% Closing The Gaps In The Software Citation Workflow. One @software{...} Citekey At A Time. % Katrin Leinweber % 34c3 - 2017-12-30

Me: kind of a "software librarian" at TIB(.eu)

• German National Library of Science and Technology, Hannover
• scientific software services, FAIR data principles, etc.
• Disclaimer: I'm here as an interested user. Not on behalf of any organisation or project mentioned herein.

State of the Citation

• scientists credit each other by citing journal articles, books, etc.
  • see 34c3 talks: "Science is Broken" & "Algorithmic science evaluation and power structure"
  • reproducibility crisis => increased interest in data citations
• also: software not equally accepted as citable unit of work, yet (scripts, packages, source code, etc.)
• some community infrastructures: Debian Science, rOpenSci, CRAN, swMATH.org, SoftwareHeritage.org, etc.

Solution examples for everyone else (#tuwat at the source)

1. Guides.GitHub.com/activities/citable-code + Zenodo.org + Git release = Digital Object Identifier…

… plus a free backup at CERN ;-)

2. CITATION files

• like LICENSE, COPYING, INSTALL, etc.
• Make a wish!¹
• Don't be shy! Try @software{...}
  • compatible with BibLaTeX, biber, Zotero, etc.
  • more examples: GitHub.com/search?q=filename:CITATION (You need to be logged in to see the results.)

@book{wickham_ggplot2_2009,
    author = {Hadley Wickham},
    title = {ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis},
    ...},
}

3. upcoming: tool-agnostic codemeta.json² standard

• example from R community: native DESCRIPTION translated by "codemetaR" into:

{"@context": [
    "http://purl.org/codemeta/2.0", 
    "http://schema.org"
    ],
  "@id": "https://doi.org10.5281/zenodo.1048320",
  "@type": "SoftwareSourceCode",
  "identifier": "codemetar",
  "description": "... defines a 'JSON-LD' format for ...",
  "issueTracker": "https://github.com/ropensci/codemetar/issues", 
  ...}

Offering metadata is necessary (but not sufficient!) for improving software citation workflows.

#tuwat++

• in 2018, watch out for CiteAs.org and YAML-based Citation-File-Format.GitHub.io
• upstream: build codemetaR-like packages / plug-ins for other languages, IDEs, etc.
• downstream: contribute GitHub.com/Zotero/translators (.js to extract bibliographic info from websites)

#tuwat++ Zotero translator for media.ccc.de

Thanks for your attention! Questions, comments, hints? New issue here, please! Thanks :-)

Further reading / watching

• Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. (2016) Software citation principles. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86 doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86
• Katherine Thornton & Finn Årup Nielsen: "Describing Software So We Can Cite Software" media.ccc.de/v/wikidatacon2017-10013
• GitHub.com/FORCE11/FORCE11-SCIWG (Software Citation Implementation Working Group of the Future of Research Communication and E-Scholarship)

Footnotes

1. in BibTeX... [Robin Wilson (2013) "Encouraging citation of software – introducing CITATION files" blog.RTWilson.com/2013/08](http://blog.rtwilson.com/encouraging-citation-of- software-introducing-citation-files/) ↩

2. CodeMeta.GitHub.io ↩