FORCE11 Software Citation Principles

A citation practice satisfies the FORCE11 Software Citation Principles (Smith, Katz & Niemeyer, 2016, PeerJ Computer Science) to the extent it meets all six: Importance, Credit and Attribution, Unique Identification, Persistence, Accessibility, and Specificity (down to the exact version used). It is a standard for citing software, not for making software FAIR -- see the separate FAIR4RS Principles.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 5 Sept 2026

Operational definition: the six principles

A citation practice or tool is aligned with the FORCE11 Software Citation Principles to the extent it satisfies all six of the following:

Importance — software should be considered a legitimate, citable product of research, not merely a footnote or acknowledgment.
Credit and attribution — citations should credit all contributors to software, recognising that roles and effort vary and that current systems for measuring citation impact are generally inadequate for capturing this.
Unique identification — a citation should include a method for identifying the software that is machine-resolvable, globally unique, interoperable and recognised community-wide (in practice, most often a DOI).
Persistence — unique identifiers and metadata describing the software, and its disposition, should persist even beyond the lifecycle of the software itself.
Accessibility — citations should facilitate access to the software itself and to its associated metadata, documentation, data and other materials necessary for both humans and machines to make informed use of the referenced software.
Specificity — citations should facilitate identification of, and access to, the specific version of software that was used, since software versions can differ significantly in function and behaviour.

Examples

A methods section that cites a specific, versioned software release via its DOI (e.g. resolving to an archived Zenodo or Software Heritage snapshot rather than a live, ever-changing repository URL) satisfies Unique Identification, Persistence and Specificity together.
The Citation File Format (CITATION.cff) is the most widely adopted machine-readable implementation of these principles: a repository’s CITATION.cff file gives downstream users exactly the structured metadata (authors, version, identifier, date) the principles call for, in a form citation managers and repository platforms can parse automatically.

Counter-example

A paper that names a software package only in prose (“analysis was performed using [Tool]”) with no version number, no identifier and no link satisfies none of the six principles — it fails Unique Identification and Specificity outright, and typically Persistence and Accessibility as well, since a reader has no durable way to find or verify exactly what was run.

How this differs from FAIR4RS

The FORCE11 Software Citation Principles are frequently conflated with FAIR4RS (the FAIR Principles for Research Software, RDA/FORCE11/ReSA, 2022) — sometimes even merged into a single, inaccurate “FAIR4RS Software Citation Principles” label. They are separate documents by overlapping but different communities, answering different questions. These citation principles (2016) govern how existing software should be referenced and credited in a paper. FAIR4RS (2022) governs how software should be made findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable as an artefact in the first place. A software package can be cited perfectly according to these six principles while still failing FAIR4RS (for example, if the cited repository has no licence or dependency documentation) — and conversely, FAIR4RS-compliant software still needs a paper to actually cite it correctly for these principles to be satisfied. The two are complementary, not interchangeable, and neither supersedes the other.

Related terms

FAIR4RS (FAIR Principles for Research Software) — the separate 2022 standard for making software FAIR, not for citing it
Citation File Format (CITATION.cff) — the standard machine-readable file format for implementing these principles
JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software) — a peer-reviewed venue that requires conformant software citation as part of publication
FORCE11 — the organisation that hosted the Software Citation Working Group

References

Smith, A.M., Katz, D.S., Niemeyer, K.E. (FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group), “Software citation principles”, PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86, 2016.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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