Both approaches often create software dependency networks (may be a little dated, but might be useful for citation chaining):
Honsel, V., Honsel, D., Herbold, S., Grabowski, J., & Waack, S. (2015, November). Mining software dependency networks for agent-based simulation of software evolution. In 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshop (ASEW) (pp. 102-108). IEEE.
Bergel, A., Maass, S., Ducasse, S., & Girba, T. (2014, September). A domain-specific language for visualizing software dependencies as a graph. In 2014 Second IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (pp. 45-49). IEEE.
Decan, A., Mens, T., & Grosjean, P. (2019). An empirical comparison of dependency network evolution in seven software packaging ecosystems. Empirical Software Engineering, 24, 381-416.
(same set of authors but I think its interesting follow up) Decan, A., & Mens, T. (2019). What do package dependencies tell us about semantic versioning?. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 47(6), 1226-1240.
Both approaches often create software dependency networks (may be a little dated, but might be useful for citation chaining):