[Python-ideas] Add a __cite__ method for scientific packages

[Steve Barnes]

On 28/06/2018 00:00, Nathan Goldbaum wrote:
> This is an interesting proposal. Speaking as a developer of scientific 
> software packages it would be really cool to have support for something 
> like this in the language itself.
> 
> The software sustainability institute in the UK have written several 
> blog posts advocating the use of CITATION files containing this sort of 
> metadata:
> 
> https://software.ac.uk/blog/2017-12-12-standard-format-citation-files
> 
> A github code search for __citation__ also gets 127 hits that mostly 
> seem to be research software that are using this attribute more or less 
> as suggested here:
> 
> https://github.com/search?q=__citation__&type=Code
> 
> It's also worth pointing out http://citeas.org/ which is sort of a 
> citation search engine for software projects. It uses a number of 
> heuristics to figure out what the appropriate citation for a piece of 
> software is.
> 
I just thought that it might be worth pointing out that this should 
actually work both ways i.e. if a specific package, module or function 
is inspired by or directly implements the methods included in a specific 
publication then any __citation__ entries within it should also cite 
that/those or allow references to them to be recovered.

The general principle is if you are expecting to be cited you also have 
to cite.

-- 
Steve (Gadget) Barnes
Any opinions in this message are my personal opinions and do not reflect 
those of my employer.

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