How to cite software?

What is the best way to cite software in publications, and how should software projects recommend being cited?

This page contains some links for an informal discussion at the PDESoft 2014 workshop

It would be great to add to this list and include also lists and ideas from other mathematical software communities. Feel free to clone this repository and issue a pull request, or send things to rjl at uw.edu for inclusion.

General Guides

• Software Sustainability Institute ... other useful software guides
• Alternative Impact Manifesto

Some Examples -- PDEs and related software

• Chombo
• Clawpack ... PyClaw
• deal.II
• Dune
• FEniCS
• OpenFOAM
• PETSc
• p4est
• Trilinos

Some Examples -- other software

• IPython
• R language
• Sage

Generating DOIs for software releases (with Github integration)

• [zenodo] (https://zenodo.org/)
• [figshare] (http://mozillascience.github.io/code-research-object/)

Venues for publishing software papers

• Journal of open research software seems rather small (31 articles total)

• Geoscientific Model Development (GMD) has been used to publish short papers with current authors for each new release of software project.

• Stackexchange discussion with many more links

• See http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2266 for an example of a short paper associated with each specific release. (But note that arXiv insisted that the papers announcing 8.0 and 8.1 were two versions of the same paper, rather than two distinct papers as was desired.)

Publishing venues in other fields

• Journal of Statistical Software
• The Stata Journal
• Examples of journal papers announcing releases:
  • Second Data release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  • Sixth Data release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  • The ALPS Project release 2.0 -- arXiv version

Other relevant links

• NSF Dear Colleague letter on data/software citation