Citation

Citing software you use in papers is key to enabling visibility for its creators and for taking a step towards reproducibility.

For a seminar on 'What RSEs should know about Software Citation', go to the HiRSE YouTube Channel.

When looking for how authors of a software you use would like to be cited, first take a look at the README of their project. Often some BibTex is included they ask you to use. Even better is when a project provides you with a CITATION.cff file. Some services like GitHub even recognize these and provide you with a nice widget: “Cite this repository”. Using this file, the Zotero (intranet link) browser plugin can add the software to your literature database, too!

Get started with your CFF file!

If you want others to cite your software, you can add a citation hint to your README, but we encourage you to add a CITATION.cff file to your repository. To get you started, use cffinit! Instead of writing the file yourself, it will provide you with a nice web UI to enter all the details and offer you to download a “ready to commit” file when finished.

It is good practice to create a publication with a persistent identifier first and use it in your CFF file. You can learn how to do that on the software publication page. It is, however, not a critical requirement to get started or if for some reason you will or can not (yet) publish your software, not even as a metadata-only publication.

Note: you can even advise people to use a different, preferred citation instead of using the metadata provided by this file.

In case you want to sync the metadata in a CITATION.cff with other metadata files (for example package systems like pyproject.toml, etc.), you might be interested in using somesy.

How to include a software citation in your paper

When using LaTeX to write your paper, you probably use BibTex for your references. Properly styled software citations, even for smaller granularities, are made simple using biblatex-software. In case you want to learn what requirements the selected publisher for your paper has for software citations, take a look at the Software Citation Policy Index.

What the FZJ Software Guidelines say about Citation

Class 1 or higher
To ensure citability, metadata must be attached in a machine-readable format as citation information[10]].
Example: The “Citation File Format” and “CodeMeta” allow an indexing and rendering of citation information on platforms such as GitHub.

To make it possible to refer to or cite software, releases (and, if applicable, the software as such) must be assigned a persistent identifier (PID). The necessary metadata can be found in the citation information (see above).

Example: Even software that is not publicly accessible can be FAIR and receive a DOI, for example, which is easier and more commonly used in text publications. In addition, a DOI allows for subsequent moving without breaking the reference. Reproducibility is greatly facilitated by citable releases of data, software, and environment.