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About

Who are we?

The RSE community at ETH is currently organised by the RSE working group. You can find out more about us here.

Are you an RSE?

There is no unique definition for “what is an RSE” and people self-identify as an RSE. You may consider yourself being an RSE if you can answer at least one of the following questions with a “yes”:

  • I like programming as much as science, and maybe a little bit more.
  • I use programming expertise to advance research.
  • I apply software engineering skills and practices to research to create more robust, manageable, and sustainable research software.

An RSE can be a researcher with a focus on programming as well as a software engineer with a connection to science:

spectrum of rses
The "RSE Spectrum"

The title “RSE” was invented with several objectives in mind:

  • To give people with overlapping profiles and interests a common identity and increase their visibility.

  • To provide a unique job title that is easier to search for and to advertise than all the little variations like “scientific programmer”, “research software specialist”, etc.

  • To highlight the importance of software (especially sustainable software development) and those who develop it in modern research.

  • To create communities of like-minded people who share common interests.

The US definition

We embrace the definition given by the The United States Research Software Engineer Association is:

We like an inclusive definition of Research Software Engineers to encompass those who regularly use expertise in programming to advance research. This includes researchers who spend a significant amount of time programming, full-time software engineers writing code to solve research problems, and those somewhere in-between. We aspire to apply the skills and practices of software development to research to create more robust, manageable, and sustainable research software.

It started in the UK

Our initiative builds on 10 years of work by others.

The Software Sustainability Institute conducted a study in 2014 to access the importance of Software in UK Research. The conclusion was that around 70% of researchers said they could not carry out their research without research software1. Another finding was that most researchers who develop research software have no formal training in software development. This blog post discusses the results of this study in more detail.

The first action taken to highlight the special role of the programmers who develop research software was to create a new and unique name: Research Software Engineers.

We recommend this article for a full overview.

  1. Software that does not generate, process or analyse results - such as word processing software, or the use of a web search - does not count as ‘research software’ for the purposes of this survey. ↩︎