What would the ideal software citation workflow look like to you?

[faokryn]

Please describe how you picture using a software citation tool to generate citations. Consider other citation tools you may have used (their strengths and weaknesses), the citation standards that you usually follow, and the citation components you believe are the most important when citing software.

More Discussion Questions

[tomhohenstein]

Quick question - for citation tools, do you mean things like Zotero or Mendeley?

[Ourobor]

I believe so. For this particular question we're looking to figure out how you would prefer to use citation tools in your scholarly work so we can fit in our tool set without upset. We are particularly interested in the complete spectrum from tools such as those to how the citations they generate integrate into your work(things like bibtex if you use tex/latex).

[kyleniemeyer]

The initial discussion prompt from @faokryn (and the additional discussion questions linked) make it look like the question is more about how to cite software used in research, not about software tools for citation itself.

For that discussion, people may be interested in the recent paper on software citation principles:

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

[sstangle73]

+1 to BibTex. Make it simple drag a URL onto an extension would be ideal for me. Allow saving several citations and dumping them into files.

[faokryn]

To clarify, as @Ourobor mentioned, with this question we are looking to discuss the preferred workflow for a program to generate a citation for software. We'd like to discuss the workflows of existing citation software for non-software sources, so that our design can be informed by what users like about those workflows, and what they do not like. @tomhohenstein , after a brief look at Zotero and Mendeley, I think it would be valuable to discuss those tools- in particular the workflows for the components for generating citations.

[HeidiSeibold]

• Having a plugin in the browser (like Zotero in Firefox) is great
• It should be for free
• Should allow exporting (e.g. to BibTex) easily
• Awesome would be something I can communicate to from the Linux Terminal (for importing and exporting citations)

Are those the kinds of things you were looking for?

[faokryn]

@HeidiSeibold, thank you for your insight. When you say you would like to see importing and exporting citations from the Linux terminal, what do you mean? In particular, could you describe the workflow you are imagining?

[HeidiSeibold]

@faokryn when I work on a scientific project, I try to make it as reproducible as possible, so if my office burns down, I would have no problems. So I use Makefiles to autmate my whole workflow. It checks if a "result"-file is older than the dependent file and if so, runs a command which updates the result-file. For software, this would mean, I check the citation database which corresponds to my project (dependent file) and if it is older than my bib-file (result-file) I would run a command which exports all new the citations from the data-base into my bib-file.

This could look something like

mybib.bib:  ~/citationdatabase/myproject.filending
    export ~/citationdatabase/myproject.filending to bibtex mybib.bib

or in other words

resultfile: dependentfile
    export dependentfile to bibtex resultfile