Via this Software Carpentry blog post , I discover this initiative aimed at encouraging the citation of software. The idea is to include a CITATION file in the root directory of your code (obviously, we are assuming here that your research projects are distributed under some kind of open source license, we don’t want this to happen ever again, right?) with information about how you would like the users/readers of that software to cite your work.
You may use this file also to tell the readers to cite your research paper (from which the software was derived) instead of citing the research tool itself (which maybe has never been published as such). This is also important because the way researchers are evaluated you may need to show that some of your papers are highly cited. We discuss this issue in this previous post: Cite our papers and not only our tools (thanks).
I’ll immediately adopt this policy in the team (so, if when downloading one of our tools you don’t see this file you’ll know that my guys just ignore me completely đŸ™‚ )
(featured image by www.futureatlas.com)
