Writing an open-source software and publishing it, for the sake of getting cited
FieldTrip (citation)
MNE (citation)
Nutmeg (citation)
SPM, (citation)


The preceding software are all open-source research software, each referenced by dozens, sometimes hundreds of research papers. It is expected that an open-source package developed by a research team will have an accompanying paper or set of papers, and that the users will cite those papers when using the package. You should make this very clear on the package website. (You do have a website for the software, right?)



To expand on this a bit, it is assumed that any research-level software package will have at least one accompanying paper, typically more, describing both the software, the functionality, and the algorithms. If you don't have that, people simply won't trust it. From my experience, most packages come from researchers with a good deal of experience/publications under their belt, who have decided to make their own scripts and techniques available for the general community. Given that it is quite difficult to obtain funding for this sort of thing until the software—and, by extension, you—is already very popular, you're essentially going to do most of the development on your "free time", which makes this a highly thankless task.

That all said, if software is your thing, go for it! If your software makes analysis easier, you can have an outsized impact on your field.