The standard site.py module adds pseudo-builtins: copyright credits exit help license quit I suggest one more: citation(). Python is being used heavily in scientific and academic fields, where it is often the convention to provide citations and references to the software used. The question of how to cite Python comes up from time to time, e.g.: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2016-March/108460.html http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5482/how-do-i-reference-the-pyth... http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/python/105846 http://grokbase.com/t/python/python-list/04684fggwd/citing-python I think that having a standard answer available for this question is good practice, and will help strength Python's position as a good scientific language. SciPy, SymPy and iPython all document how they prefer to be cited: https://scipy.org/citing.html https://github.com/sympy/sympy#citation http://ipython.org/citing.html As do other languages such as Mathematica: http://support.wolfram.com/kb/472 But I think it would be a good idea to emulate the R language, which provides a function that gives the prefered citation. At the R prompt:

citation()

To cite R in publications use: R Core Team (2014). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/. A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is @Manual{, title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing}, author = {{R Core Team}}, organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing}, address = {Vienna, Austria}, year = {2014}, url = {http://www.R-project.org/}, } We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it when using it for data analysis. See also ‘citation("pkgname")’ for citing R packages. * * * If you provide a package name such as "splines", the R's output is the same except that the first line starts with: "The ‘splines’ package is part of R." (I don't have any third-party packages installed to test, but presumably they will offer customised output.) My suggestion is that we follow R's lead and add a citation() function to site.py which gives a suggested, standard, citation string that people can copy. Obviously we cannot expect to match all standard formats, but we can provide one and folks can convert to the format their university of journal requires. (Converting between academic reference styles is out of scope of this proposal.) The initial implementation might look something like this: year = platform.python_build()[1].split()[2] vers = platform.python_version() _CITE = """\ To cite Python in publications, please use: Python Core Team ({}). Python {}: A dynamic, open source programming language. Python Software Foundation. URL https://www.python.org/. """.format(year, vers) def citation(): print(_CITE) Or perhaps it should use the same implementation as copyright, credits and license. Thoughts? -- Steve