RSE Group Evidence Bank
What is this?
This repository contains useful information and resources for people or organisations wishing to set up their own Research Software Engineering (RSE) group.
How is it organised?
The material in this repository is grouped by career stage:
- Junior RSE
- RSE
- Senior RSE
- Head of RSE
Note that there exists a range of different job titles and descriptions that broadly fit into the RSE category, and the folder names with "RSE" stand for all of these.
Each exisiting RSE group that has contributed material to the bank has created their own directory with the information and resources, which have been sorted into these categories. The information and resources will differ from group to group as their are many different ways to setup and run such a group.
Similarly, the categorisation into junior/mid-level/senior and salary bands vary from institute to institute.
Can I contribute?
Yes! This resource will be enhanced by more groups contributing information and resources. The type of information that is useful includes:
- Information on the size and scale of the RSE group
- How the RSE group is postioned within the larger organisation
- Evidence that was used to help get approval for the group from the wider organisation
- How the RSE group is structured and managed
- How promotion and progression is managed within the group (and how this is facilitated by the wider organisation)
- What performance metrics the RSE group uses to demonstrate success
- Job descriptions
Not all groups will be able to provide all this information and they are not expected to to be able to contribute - any useful resources and information are welcome and it is up to the individual group how they structure the information within their subdirectory.
You can contribute by forking the repository, adding your material and then issuing a pull request against this repository. Alternatively, you can send your material to info@society-rse.org and it can be added directly.
External resources
- D. S. Katz, K. McHenry, J. S. Lee, "Research Software Sustainability: Lessons Learned at NCSA," 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 7249-7256, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/71494
- D. S. Katz, K. McHenry, C. Reinking, R. Haines, "Research Software Development & Management in Universities: Case Studies from Manchester's RSDS Group, Illinois' NCSA, and Notre Dame's CRC," Intl. Work. on Soft. Eng. for Science (SE4Science), 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/SE4Science.2019.00009 (Preprint: arXiv 1903.00732)
- D. S. Katz, K. McHenry, J. S. Lee, "Senior level RSE career paths (with an s)", SeptembRSE, 2021. https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/senior-rse-paths/
Where did this come from?
The idea for this repository came from the International RSE Leaders Workshop hosted at the Alan Turning Institute in London in January 2018. You can find the notes from the intial discussion at:
In an RSE Leaders meeting in December 2021, it was then discussed that it would useful to update and extend the data base in order to reflect the RSE career ladder. The RSE leaders asked the Society of Research Software Engineering to take ownership of and lead this.