Version 1.0 – 2018-02-16
Contributors: Stephan Druskat, Michael R. Crusoe
Software is an important research product.
It should be cited like all other scientific products.
The following guides help researchers understand present issues and cite research software correctly in their publications. They also present authors of research software with tools that can help ensure their software can be cited in a way that follows best practices.
Researchers and software developers aren’t the only stakeholders in research software citation, and thus the list below will be extended to include others as well, such as repositories, funders, indexers, etc. If you’re keen to see guides for these parties sooner rather than later, please consider contributing them.
Guides
Citation of research software: An introduction
What is the state of research software citation, and what solutions are out there?
Research software citation for researchers
Find out how to cite software correctly in your publication.
Research software citation for software developers
Find out how to make sure that your software can be cited, and cited correctly.
Further resources
Communities working on research software citation solutions
- The FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group – successor of the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group – works on implementations of software citation workflows.
- The WSSSPE community (Working Towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences) is working on research software sustainability, and software citation is an important part of it.
Projects
- The Citation File Format is a machine- and human-readable and -writable format for software citation metadata files.
- The CodeMeta project provides compatibility information across software metadata formats via a crosswalk table, and a minimal schema for software metadata, complete with an implementation in JSON-LD.
- The Zenodo repository accepts research products of all kinds – including software – and provides DOIs for artifacts, making research products sustainable.
- The figshare repository also accepts source code and binaries and provides DOIs for them.
- CiteAs retrieves citation information for different types of research products, including software.
- shouldacite offers guidance on whether a specific software should be cited and provides further pointers as to how to cite and get cited.
Publications
- Smith, Arfon M., Katz, Daniel S., Niemeyer, Kyle E., & FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. (2016). Software citation principles. PeerJ Computer Science, 2, e86. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86.
- Druskat, Stephan, Spaaks, Jurriaan H., Chue Hong, Neil, Haines, Robert, Baker, James. (2017, December). Citation File Format (CFF) - Specifications. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3515946.
- Jones, Matthew B., Boettiger, Carl, Mayes, Abby Cabunoc, Smith, Arfon, Slaughter, Peter, Niemeyer, Kyle, … Goble, Carole. (2017). CodeMeta: an exchange schema for software metadata. Version 2.0. KNB Data Repository. https://doi.org/10.5063/schema/codemeta-2.0.
Blog posts
- Katz, Daniel S. (2018, February). Compact identifiers for software: The last missing link in user-oriented software citation? Blog. Retrieved from https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/06/compact-identifiers-for-software-the-last-missing-link-in-user-oriented-software-citation/.
- Druskat, Stephan, Bast, Radovan, Chue Hong, Neil, Konovalov, Alexander, Rowley, Andrew, & Silva, Raniere. (2017, December). A standard format for CITATION files. Software and research: The Software Sustainability Institute’s Blog. Blog. Retrieved from https://www.software.ac.uk/index.php/blog/2017-12-12-standard-format-citation-files.
- Katz, Daniel S. (2017, September). Software Heritage and repository metadata: a software citation solution. Blog. Retrieved from https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/software-heritage-and-repository-metadata-a-software-citation-solution/.
- Katz, Daniel S. (2017, February). Creation, publication, and citation: Issues in software citation versus paper and data citation. Blog. Retrieved from https://danielskatzblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/creation-publication-and-citation-issues-in-software-citation-versus-paper-and-data-citation/.
- Wilson, Robin. (2013). Encouraging citation of software - introducing CITATION files. Software and research: The Software Sustainability Institute’s Blog. Blog. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2ECSdEQ.
- Jackson, Mike. How to cite and describe software. Software and research: The Software Sustainability Institute’s Blog. Blog. Retrieved from https://www.software.ac.uk/how-cite-and-describe-software.
Contributions
Community contributions to this site are welcome! Please file issues and create pull requests on the project’s GitHub site at https://github.com/research-software/citation.