[Python-ideas] Add citation() to site.py

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
> On 17Mar2016 1335, Ethan Furman wrote:
>>
>> On 03/17/2016 01:32 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>>
>>  > One way to think about it is that providing a preferred citation is
>>  > useful for folks who want to cite, and folks who don't want to cite
>>  > will ignore it.
>>
>> I would also think that citing the software increases the ease of
>> duplicating the results.
>
>
> Afraid not. Posting a requirements.txt or a conda spec file would be far
> more valuable for this, or these days sharing a Jupyter Notebook with the
> code and dependency-spec embedded.

Docker containers are also getting intense interest for this use case.

It is true that citations can provide some help with reproduction
(e.g. the cite might give you a hint whether the code attached to the
paper was tested on py2 or py3), but yeah, cites are more about
distributing credit and gathering metrics ("how many papers published
last year used python?") than about reproducibility per se.

> It's also arguable as to how valuable reproducing the results in an
> identical environment actually is. Yes, your code runs on a different
> machine, but if your "research" is code then you are a developer, not a
> scientist.

The complication here is that it turns out that if you follow this
definition, then there are fewer and fewer scientists every year. Soon
there will be none left :-).

These questions around reproducibility/replicability are also
extremely hot topics in science right now... not clear how it will all
play out, but I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of
scientists who think recording and communicating exact environments is
very valuable.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org