Cite other tools and workflows

Help support a culture of recognition by citing the software that you use, according to the citation instructions of the software creators.

How?

Here, we’ve included some steps to success:

1. Review the Software Citation Checklist for Developers (Chue Hong et al., 2019).
2. Identify all the software that made a significant contribution to your research, check the software developer’s recommended citation methods, and cite both the code and any journal publications.
3. Create citations that won’t break using persistent identifiers like DOIs.
4. Software hosting services like GitHub, SourceForge, and WorkflowHub currently provide some support for software citations using DOIs issued by platforms like Zenodo and DataCite. For example, GitHub’s integration with Zenodo allows users to access a version controlled citation directly from the software repository.
5. Many journals actually restrict the number of citations that you can have, and unfortunately it’s often the case that software citations are the ones that get left out. A tip here is to then include these additional citations in the supplementary materials.

Examples

• CRAN provides the following documentation on how to Report and Cite Packages.

References

1. Chue Hong, N. P., Allen, A., Gonzalez-Beltran, de Waard, A., Smith, A. M., Robinson, C., Jones, C., Bouquin, D., Katz, D. S., Kennedy, D., Ryder, G., Hausman, J., Hwang, L., Jones, M. B., Harrison, M., Crosas, M., Wu, M., Löwe, P., Haines, R., … Pollard, T. (2019). Software Citation Checklist for Developers. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.3482768

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