The Open University is the project coordinator for the 2-year CHIST-ERA funded SoFAIR project which aims to make research software a first-class, FAIR research object (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
We are excited to share that our paper, “Identifying and Classifying Software Mentions in Full-Text Scholarly Documents,” has been accepted for presentation at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2025). This work reports the first systematic evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for detecting and classifying software mentions in research papers. Using benchmark datasets, SoftCite, SoMeSci, and the new SoFAIR corpus the study compares different prompting and retrieval strategies, showing that LLM-based approaches substantially outperform previous rule-based and conventional NLP methods, particularly across a multi-disciplinary corpus. The work demonstrates the potential for LLMs to move software-mention detection from a research challenge toward a deployable capability, capable of extracting software names, versions, and publishers.