"Naturally, the role that software of any type plays in academic research varies greatly with the field of study. Software itself is at the center of computer science and physics simulation research, for example, while it plays more auxiliary roles such as data mining and statistical reporting in the social sciences. Literary criticism and history depends heavily on library work, where open source can provide important infrastructure.
"Regardless of the field, however, collecting, studying, and tracking the work of predecessors and contemporaries is always critical, as evidenced by the large number of open source projects designed to help track sources and manage bibliographical resources. The simplest applications, such as I, Librarian, help the researcher collect, organize, and annotate reference material. Most such applications allow full-text and metadata searching of collected resources, and can be used to directly search online catalogs from publishers such as PubMed and arXiv, and major online reference sites like JSTOR and ARTstor, or Google Book Search and Google Scholar"
