Citation

Estimated time: 2 minutes

Overview

Questions

• How can I make my work easier to cite?

Objectives

• Make your work easy to cite

You may want to include a file called CITATION or CITATION.txt that describes how to reference your project; the one for Software Carpentry states:

To reference Software Carpentry in publications, please cite:

Greg Wilson: "Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned". F1000Research,
2016, 3:62 (doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-62.v2).

@online{wilson-software-carpentry-2016,
  author      = {Greg Wilson},
  title       = {Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned},
  version     = {2},
  date        = {2016-01-28},
  url         = {http://f1000research.com/articles/3-62/v2},
  doi         = {10.12688/f1000research.3-62.v2}
}

More detailed advice, and other ways to make your code citable can be found at the Software Sustainability Institute blog and in:

Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. (2016) Software citation
principles. [PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86](https://peerj.com/articles/cs-86/)
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.8

There is also an @software{... BibTeX entry type in case no “umbrella” citation like a paper or book exists for the project you want to make citable.

Finally, you may wish to include citation information in a Citation File Format (CITATION.cff). CFF files are standardized human and machine readable citation information files for software and datasets. If you host your repository on GitHub, this information is automatically linked and rendered on the repository page and a BibTeX snippet is provided, which users can copy and paste, making it easy for your project to be cited. Further, integration with both Zenodo and Zotero is supported.

A chapter of The Turing Way provides more detail on how you can use CFF files to make your software citable.

You can use the cff-init website to easily create and update a CITATION.cff file.

Key Points

• Add a CITATION file to a repository to explain how you want your work cited.