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

[Steve Dower]

On 17Mar2016 1608, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:38 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
>> 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 :-).

Nah, someone can just write a seminal paper that redefines science in 
terms of Python and we'll be good for another few decades :)

> 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.

I certainly agree with this, but the point of communicating the exact 
environment is not always so that other can reproduce the environment 
(which includes the problem, parametisation, benchmarks, preprocessing 
and more as well as the software itself), but so they can compare 
environments. In some cases it could be used so the environment can be 
identical and a change to the work be compared instead, but I'd consider 
that "advancement" rather than "reproduction".

But this is a tangent I'm not desperately keen to follow through on, so 
I'll leave it here.

---

On the actual text of the citation, have the big "citation formats" 
(IEEE, APA, etc.) defined formats/metadata for versioned software 
products? I don't think they had last time I used them, but that was 
four years ago now.

Cheers,
Steve