Researchers are not aware of the resources to cite software

[rayi113]

Use Case: Researchers are not aware of the resources to cite software

• Contributors: Leslie Hsu

  Goals and Summary

A graduate student wrote a script to analyze data for a publication. They want to cite the software in the publication, but don't know where to submit the software, how to document it, or how to get a citable identifier, and how to cite the script.

Why is it important and to whom?

This is important for authors (they don't know what to do), and the publishers (if they want to promote this.)

Why hasn’t it been solved yet?

A solution may very well exist, but the problem is INFORMING the wider community of what is the best practice. (I don't know what is the best solution though.)

Actionable Outcomes

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Additional Information and Links

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[mbjones]

• For describing the software, see theMozilla Science Lab codemeta project that is crosswalking software description vocabularies. But you are right, best practice has not been established, nor has minimum practice.
• In terms of repos that will accept software uploads and generate DOIs, there are several choices:
  • General purpose archives like the KNB and FigShare and Zenodo
  • Code repositories like GitHub
  • Languages-specific repos (like CRAN, PyPi, etc.), but these tend to only accept libraries intended for re-use, and don't generally mint DOIs