Software Citation Principles

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1 GitHub, Inc., San Francisco, California, United States
2 National Center for Supercomputing Applications & Electrical and Computer Engineering Department & School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States
3 School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v2
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Digital Libraries, Software Engineering
Keywords
Software citation, Software credit, Attribution
Copyright
© 2016 Smith et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. 2016. Software Citation Principles. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2169v2

Abstract

Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focussed on data citation, this document summarizes the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group and its activities between June 2015 and April 2016. Based on a review of existing community practices, the goal of the working group was to produce a consolidated set of citation principles that may encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines and venues. Our work is presented here as a set of software citation principles, a discussion of the motivations for developing the principles, reviews of existing community practice, and a discussion of the requirements these principles would place upon different stakeholders. Working examples and possible technical solutions for how these principles can be implemented will be discussed in a separate paper.

Author Comment

Additional discussion and references were added in Section 4.1 to improve the description of workshops held on the topic of software citation. In addition, a few grammatical and reference errors were corrected.