GitHub in Numbers for Bioinformaticians

Impact of Github in Numbers:

An API for all MS-based File formats

We recently released and published our first Java API (Application Programming Interface) for the most common file formats in proteomics, not only ms files but also identification files such as mzIdentML and mztab. 

ms-data-core-api (https://github.com/PRIDE-Utilities/ms-data-core-api)

The library allow the end-users and the developers to use a common data structure for proteomics independently of the file types, and .. But first lets try to understand what is a API.

What is an API?

Imagine you are a builder or civil engineering and your are building your bridge, different components, blocks and different teams needs to be coordinated and plugged for the final results. Wrong communications between the members of the teams, different block sizes or building plans only produced strange results. 

In the simplest terms, APIs are sets of requirements, data structures, objects that govern how applications and software components can talk each other. An API, is a set of routines and protocols that provide building blocks for computer programmers and web developers to build software applications. In the past, APIs were largely associated with computer operating systems and desktop applications. In recent years though, we have seen the emergence of Web APIs (Web Services).

What is ms-data-core-api?

The ms-data-core-api is a free, open-source library for developing computational proteomics tools and pipelines. The Application Programming Interface, written in Java, enables rapid tool creation by providing a robust, pluggable programming interface and common data model. The data model is based on controlled vocabularies/ontologies and captures the whole range of data types included in common proteomics experimental workflows, going from spectra to peptide/protein identifications to quantitative results. 

The library contains readers for three of the most used Proteomics Standards Initiative standard file formats: mzML, mzIdentML, and mzTab. In addition to mzML, it also supports other common mass spectra data formats: dta, ms2, mgf, pkl, apl (text-based), mzXML and mzData (XML-based). Also, it can be used to read PRIDE XML, the original format used by the PRIDE database, one of the world-leading proteomics resources. Finally, we present a set of algorithms and tools whose implementation illustrates the simplicity of developing applications using the library.

Adding CITATION to your R package

Original post from Robin's Blog:

Software is very important in science – but good software takes time and effort that could be used to do other work instead. I believe that it is important to do this work – but to make it worthwhile, people need to get credit for their work, and in academia that means citations. However, it is often very difficult to find out how to cite a piece of software – sometimes it is hidden away somewhere in the manual or on the web-page, but often it requires sending an email to the author asking them how they want it cited. The effort that this requires means that many people don’t bother to cite the software they use, and thus the authors don’t get the credit that they need. We need to change this, so that software – which underlies a huge amount of important scientific work – gets the recognition it deserves.

Making Your Code Citable

Original post from GitHub Guides:

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are the backbone of the academic reference and metrics system. If you’re a researcher writing software, this guide will show you how to make the work you share on GitHub citable by archiving one of your GitHub repositories and assigning a DOI with the data archiving tool Zenodo.

ProTip: This tutorial is aimed at researchers who want to cite GitHub repositories in academic literature. Provided you’ve already set up a GitHub repository, this tutorial can be completed without installing any special software. If you haven’t yet created a project on GitHub, start first byuploading your work to a repository.