# Debian in the Research Software Ecosystem: A Bibliometric Analysis

Joenio Marques da Costa, Christina von Flach

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Joenio Marques da Costa, Christina von Flach. Debian in the Research Software Ecosystem: A Bibliometric Analysis. DebConf25, IRISA, Jul 2025, Brest, France. pp.13. hal-05334638

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# Debian in the Research Software Ecosystem:
A Bibliometric Analysis

Joenio Marques da Costa, Christina von Flach
Institute of Computing, Federal University of Bahia
Email: {joenio.costa,flach}@ufba.br

**Abstract—Context:** The Debian system has historically participated in academic works and scientific projects, with well-known examples including NeuroDebian, Debian Med, Debsources, Debian Science, and Debian GIS, where the scientific relevance of Debian and its contribution to the Research Software ecosystem are evident.

**Objective:** The objective of this study is to investigate the Debian system through academic publications, with the aim of classifying articles, mapping research, identifying trends, and finding opportunities.

**Method:** The study is based on a bibliometric analysis starting with an initial search for the term “Debian” in the titles, abstracts, or keywords of academic publications, using the Scopus database. This analysis calculates metrics of co-citation, co-authorship, and word co-occurrence, and is guided by a set of research questions and criteria for inclusion and exclusion to conduct the bibliometric analysis.

**Results:** The study includes a set of articles published across various fields of knowledge, providing a map of the academic publication space about Debian. The study's data will be available in a public repository, reporting demographic and bibliometric trends, including the most cited articles, active countries, researchers, and popular conferences.

**Conclusion:** Results includes a bibliometric and demographic analysis identified in publications about Debian, shedding light on the intellectual structure of academic research. The results of the analyses can help researchers gain an overview of existing trends in publications about Debian and identify areas that require more attention from the scientific community.

**Index Terms**—Software engineering, Operating Systems, Metrics/Measurement, Software science.

## I. INTRODUCTION

Software is a new scientific pillar in modern science. Alongside theories and experiments, it serves as proof of concept for the development and evaluation of new technological artifacts, such as algorithms, methods, systems, tools, and other computer-based technologies [1]. Scientists not only use software to conduct research but are also its primary developers. Across various domains of knowledge, researchers develop and build new software systems as part of their investigations.

The motto "better software, better research" [2], and questions about how to develop, maintain, and distribute research software gained popularity. In this context, open-source practices may influence science to the extent that open source software is considered a fundamental requirement for Open Science [3], [4]. This begs the question whether and how open source software and its models, are scientifically relevant

and can positively contribute to a sustainable ecosystem of software for science.

Debian [5] is a software project with sustainable characteristics. This project develops one of the oldest and most widely used free operating systems, Debian, established in 1993 and based on Linux. It is composed exclusively of free software and is known for its stability and reliability, serving as the foundation for many other projects, notably Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Tails, Deepin, and Raspberry Pi OS. These characteristics suggest that the socio-technical structures of the Debian project and system possess interesting qualities for the research software ecosystem, in terms of a sustainable model for the collaborative, decentralized, and open production, distribution, and use of software. Initiatives for distributed workflow tools in Computational Biology that use Debian [6], collaborative infrastructure projects for Neuroscience research like NeuroDebian [7], or Debian Med for software distribution in Medicine [8], put Debian closer to open science research infrastructures [9]. Understanding how Debian is used within the research software ecosystem in academic settings is important. However, there are no reviews available on this subject.

In this study, we use *Bibliometric Analysis* [10], a rigorous method that reveals nuances in the evolution of a specific field and sheds light on emerging areas, to investigate Debian from the perspective of *Research Software*, mapping the presence of Debian in academic publications. This work stands as a first step towards understanding how the research software ecosystem and studies on Debian are related, shedding light on opportunities and challenges in this field.

## II. RELATED WORK

In [11], an analogy is drawn between the open-source development model and academic research, with open source considered a special case of academic research and software development viewed as a scientific activity similar to applied theories. Debian and Red Hat are cited as the two major players among Linux distributions.

In [12], Debian is considered technically one of the most well-equipped distributions, known for its strong commitment to the ethical principles of free software. It has organizational modes and a series of micro-practices that allow for cohesion, sustainability, and growth over time within its networked production space, creating a community that evolves sustainably while adhering to the principles of free software.

In [13], Debian is considered one of the largest "software collections" in history, with experience of developing research
software in academic settings, technology transfer to the free software community through active participation, and understanding needs rather than imposing an academic vision, which often does not solve real-world problems.

### III. RESEARCH STRATEGY

We conduct a quantitative *Bibliometric Analysis* [10] on a dataset of research papers, using the R software and the Bibliometrix package [14] for analyzing, synthesizing, and presenting the results. Due to the exploratory nature of our work, we only collected data from one bibliographic research database, Scopus [15].

#### A. Goal and Research Questions

The goal of this study is to analyze the volume of scientific publications available on the Scopus database that mention Debian with the purpose of ranking the output of researchers and institutions, from the point of view of researchers interested in Debian and research software.

The following research questions were formulated with the aforementioned goal in mind:

* RQ 1. What is the annual number of publications? (publication count by year)

* RQ 2. Which papers have been cited the most by other papers? (top-cited papers)

* RQ 3. Who are the most active researchers, measured by number of published papers? (active researchers)

* RQ 4. Which countries are contributing the most, based on the affiliations of the researchers? (active countries)

* RQ 5. Which venues (i.e., conferences, journals) are the main targets of papers? (top venues)

* RQ 6. What are the most relevant terms and concepts in the field? (top-relevant terms)

#### B. Data Sources and Eligibility Criteria

Scopus [15] is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 21,000 titles from over 5,000 publishers, of which 20,000 are peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences.

#### C. Search Strategy and Data Retrieval

We followed a structured, systematic literature review approach to ensure thoroughness. The data were retrieved from the Scopus database on June 5, 2025, using the query string "TITLE-ABS-KEY (debian)". A total of 473 results were identified and extracted in CSV format for further analysis by the Bibliometrix software. Table I describes the criteria used for paper selection.

#### D. Screening Process

We narrowed down the 473 results to 431 primary studies, excluding 21 articles with a publication year before 1993 or later than 2024, 13 documents without an author, and 8 articles that were not in English.

<table><caption>TABLE I
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA.</caption><thead><tr><td>Criteria</td><td>Name</td><td>Feature</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>C1</td><td>Documents type</td><td>All types</td></tr><tr><td>C2</td><td>Search field</td><td>Title; Abstract; Keywords</td></tr><tr><td>C3</td><td>Document accessibility</td><td>All (open and non-open access)</td></tr><tr><td>C4</td><td>Publisher data range</td><td>All years</td></tr><tr><td>C5</td><td>Query expression</td><td>TITLE-ABS-KEY (debian)</td></tr><tr><td>C6</td><td>Language</td><td>All languages</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Annual Scientific Production by N. of Documents.</figcaption></figure>

We also examined at the context in which the term "Debian" was used in the article to fix errors in the data. For instance, the paper "La perspectiva profesional en la reforma de la atención primaria de salud: una aproximación cualitativa" from 1995, was removed from our dataset, because the Spanish term "debían" was incorrectly identified. The relevant excerpt from the abstract is reproduced below.

> "programas de enfermedades prevalentes debían venir elaborados de forma"

Such results were excluded from the CSV file before running the analysis with the Bibliometrix software. In this phase, 11 papers were manually removed, resulting in a final CSV file containing 420 documents. This data was processed using the Bibliometrix tool, which found 1270 authors, 300 venues (journal or conference name), a timespan of 2000 to 2024, 1207 author keywords, 47 authors of single-authored documents, and 9759 references.

### IV. DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND BIBLIOMETRICS

To answer the research questions, we analyzed the demographic trends and bibliometrics of the academic literature citing Debian. In total, the analysis encompassed 420 papers, written in the English language, published between 2000 and 2024. Among these were 259 conference papers, 135 articles, 11 books, 11 book chapters, and 4 reviews.

#### A. RQ 1 - Publication count per year

Figure 1 shows the annual publication volume of papers mentioning Debian. The first paper indexed by Scopus mentioning Debian was published in 2000, only 7 years after the Debian release in 1993.

The first article citing Debian from 2000 is "Including Diagnostic Information in Configuration Models" from the
author "Tommi Syrjänen", a conference paper published on
the venue "Computational Logic (CL)". Debian is mentioned
in the abstract in the following sentence.

"As an example, a subset of the configuration problem for the Debian GNU/Linux system is formalized using the new rule-based language."

The second paper is "Demudi: The Debian Multimedia Distribution" by the author "Déchelle, F", published in 2001. The paper introduces the DeMuDi project, the first multimedia distribution for GNU/Linux.

The third paper is "Statistically based postprocessing of phylogenetic analysis by clustering Free" by the author "Cara Stockham", published in 2002. Debian is mentioned in the abstract in the following sentence.

"The Robinson-Foulds distance matrices and the strict consensus trees are computed using PAUP (Swofford, 2001) and the Daniel Huson's tree library on Intel Pentium workstations running Debian Linux."

The last article included in our dataset is "A Comparative Study on Vulnerabilities, Challenges, and Security Measures in Wireless Network Security" published in 2024 by author "Ahsan Ullah". Debian is mentioned in the paper abstract as the environment where the authors generated their dataset.

"Dataset, generated using Tpot within Debian operating system, serves as the cornerstone of this research, with data collection spanning from August 2023 to September 2023, ensuring its timeliness and relevance."

Figure 1 confirms the trend observed in other bibliometric studies, indicating an increase in publications over the years. Between 2000 and 2002, there was one publication per year, followed by two publications in 2003, five papers in 2004, and eight publications in 2005. From 2006 onward, the number of publications exceeded ten per year, with peaks in 2016 (32 papers), 2023 (33 papers), and 2024 (25 papers).

## B. RQ 2 - Top-cited papers

The top two most-cited papers are "Meep: A flexible free-software package for electromagnetic simulations by the FDTD method" (2010), by Ardavan F. Oskooi, with 2,437 citations, and "SNP-sites: rapid efficient extraction of SNPs from multi-FASTA alignments Open Access" (2016), by Andrew J. Page, with 893 citations. Ardavan F. Oskooi's paper describes the implementation of an algorithm in a software named Meep, and Debian is mentioned in the sentence below.

"Operating system: Any Unix-like system; developed under Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.2."

Andrew J. Page's article describes the software SNP-sites, and Debian is mentioned in the sentence below.

"It is easy to install through the Debian and Homebrew package managers, and has been successfully tested on more than 20 operating systems."

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Top 10 Most Productive Countries by N. of Documents based on author affiliations.</figcaption></figure>

Among the most cited papers, there is a prevalence of articles describing algorithm implementations and software tools. According to the multi-dimensional model for Research Software categorization [1], these software tools are research software of the type "Modeling, Simulation, and Data Analytics". All of the top 10 most cited papers can be understood in the same manner.

## C. RQ 3 - Most active researchers

We followed the approach of other bibliometric/ranking studies [16] to get an overview of active researchers: we counted the number of papers published by each author. The ranking is as follows: Zacchiroli S. (13 papers), German D.M. (10 papers), Di Cosmo R. (9 papers) and Robles G. (9 papers).

Among the most active researchers, there are publications with studies about Debian or for Debian. The oldest article by the first author in the ranking, titled "The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating bazaar metadata for Quality Assurance and data mining" (2010), is a study on the metadata of Debian packages and developers. The oldest article by the second author in the ranking, titled "A Model to Understand the Building and Running Inter-Dependencies of Software" (2007), presents a study applied to Debian on package inter-dependencies.

## D. RQ 4 - Active countries

We ranked the most active countries based on the affiliation of the authors who have published papers mentioning Debian. The rationale for this ranking is to know the researchers of which countries (as a group) focus more on using, contributing or investigating Debian in the context of academic research.

In this analysis, we covered a total of 46 countries. Leading in contributions are the USA (28 papers), followed by the France (20 papers), Canada (19 papers) and Germany (17 papers). These findings are presented through a bar chart in Figure 2, showcasing the distribution of contributions across the top 10 countries.

## E. RQ 5 - Top venues

To rank the venues, we used the number of papers published in each venue. Table II summarizes the top 10 venues. Many
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Cloud of words from all papers' keywords.</figcaption></figure>

major software engineering conferences and journals are in this list, for example, the venue with most of the papers (17 papers) is the “Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)”.

<table><caption>TABLE II
THE 10 SOURCES RANKED BY NUMBER OF PAPERS.</caption><thead><tr><td>Name</td><td>Acronym</td><td>#</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Lect. Notes Comput. Science</td><td>LNCS</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>ACM Int. Conf. Proc. Ser.</td><td>ICPS</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Comput Phys Commun</td><td>CPC</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Empirical Software Engineering</td><td>-</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>Int Conf Software Engineering</td><td>ICSE</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>IEEE Int. Working Conf. Min Softw. Repos.</td><td>MSR</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>Bioinformatics</td><td>-</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Adv. Intelligent Sys. Comput.</td><td>-</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>J. Phys. Conf. Ser.</td><td>JPCS</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>ACM Conf Computer Commun Secur</td><td>-</td><td>5</td></tr></tbody></table>

## F. RQ 6 - Top-relevant terms and frequent words

A convenient way to analyze the popular subject areas is to visualize the word cloud of papers keywords. Figure 3 shows a word cloud created with Bibliometrix, using all keywords, including the author keywords and the Scopus indexed keywords<fnref n="1" />. The terms “open source”, “operating system”, “linux” and “open systems” are among the most popular terms in the set of collected publications. We notice a lack of relevance for the term “free software”, despite the relevance of the Free Software principles that the Debian project adheres.

## V. DISCUSSIONS

Below we summarize the main results of each RQ and discuss relevant trends and findings.

* RQ 1. (Publication count by year)

- The first publication indexed in Scopus citing Debian is from 2000 (7 years after the creation of Debian).

- The year with the highest number of papers is 2016 (32 papers) and 2023 (33 papers).

* RQ 2. (Top-cited papers)

- The two top-cited publications have appeared in the years 2010 (2437 citations) and 2016 (893 citations), and are from the fields of Physics and Biology.

- These two top-cited publications are software papers contributing with research software, classified as software for “Modeling, Simulation, and Data Analytics”.

* RQ 3. (Active researchers)

- The four top-active researchers are: Zacchiroli S. (13 papers), German DM. (10 papers), Di Cosmo R. (9 papers) and Robles G. (9 papers).

- Among the papers published by the most active researchers we can find studies about Debian and for Debian.

* RQ 4. (Active countries)

- The four most active countries in number of publication mentioning Debian are: USA (28 papers), France (20 papers), Canada (19 papers) and Germany (17 papers).

* RQ 5. (Top venues)

- The best ranked venue with 16 papers is Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

- Many major software engineering conferences and journals are in this list, such as ICSE and MSR.

* RQ 6. (Top-relevant terms)

- The keyword most frequent among all articles is “operating system”, followed by “open source” and “linux”.

- We notice a lack of relevance for the term “free software”, despite the relevance of the Free Software principles by the Debian project.

## VI. CONCLUSIONS

The purpose of this study was to draw attention to Debian's prominence in scholarly publications. A bibliometric analysis was carried out on the 420 papers published between 2000 and 2024 (24 years) in the Scopus digital library, guided by six research questions. This bibliometric study revealed the first impressions about how Debian is mentioned in academic publications, shedding light on the intellectual structure of academic research citing Debian. This study is an initial step toward a more comprehensive bibliometric analysis of Debian in academic settings and is part of an ongoing research titled *A theory about Debian as a Sustainable Ecosystem for Research Software*, as part of the PhD program at the Institute of Computing of the Federal University of Bahia - Brazil. The study's datasets, analysis plan, and LATEX source code are accessible at the following URL: https://gitlab.com/rslab/debconf2025-academictrack.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the Context Platform [17] team for the support on how to conduct a bibliometric analysis. Also, would like to thank Mari Moura for the reviews and the support during the exploratory data analysis of this study.

<footnote n="1">¹The “author keywords” are chosen by the author to best reflect the content of the document, and the “Scopus indexed keywords” are chosen by Scopus and are standardized to vocabularies derived from thesauri that Elsevier owns or licenses.</footnote>
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