Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A reference list entry citing Astropy v5.3.4 with its Zenodo DOI and CITATION.cff metadata.
- Is an instance
A bioinformatics paper citing BWA v0.7.17 with version, DOI, and authors.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A footnote saying 'analysis performed in R' with no version or citation.
- Not an instance
A paper that thanks 'open-source tools' without naming any.
Editorial commentary
FORCE11's Software Citation Working Group published the Software Citation Principles in 2016 (Smith et al.), defining importance, credit and attribution, unique identification, persistence, accessibility, and specificity (down to the version). The Citation File Format (CITATION.cff) is the principal machine-readable expression supporting these principles.
References
- Smith, Katz, Niemeyer, 'Software citation principles' (PeerJ Computer Science, 2016).
Also known as
FORCE11 Software Citation Principles
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Software citation (Software Citation Working Group)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-citation-fair-working-group" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Software citation (Software Citation Working Group)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-citation-fair-working-group",
"description": "The practice of citing research software in the reference list of a publication, with sufficient metadata (authors, title, version, persistent identifier, role) to credit creators and enable retrieval of the cited version.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility-and-computational-research/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-citation-fair-working-group",
"sameAs": [
"FORCE11 Software Citation Principles"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
