Reviewer feedback from November, 2023

[matthewfeickert]

https://indico.jlab.org/event/459/papers/11688/

Hi Matthew, this is what we got from the referee:

This is a nice summary of the event. It's not the easiest read, some of the sentences are somewhat long, but I don't have any general concerns. I'm a bit surprised though that GitLab (particularly the instance hosted at CERN) is not discussed. A couple of suggestions and corrections:

Abstract:

• HSF and IRIS-HEP abbreviations not used in the following, i.e. do not introduce them here (you do that in Section 1)
• "and the associated credit it provides" --> unclear what "it" refers to, please adjust
• "Computing In High Energy and Nuclear Physics" --> capitalization is somewhat odd, capitalize only "CHEP" letters or use lower case "in"?

2 Current State of Software Citation in HEP

• "that summarized the experiments current" --> experiments'
• "code resides”. [10]" --> citation before full stop
• "the Monte Carlo simulation generators" --> add "used" or something like that
• "consistently citing the Monte Carlo generators" --> same as above
• "preprints through publication" --> "preprints to publication"
• "INSPIRE HEP Zenodo community" --> misses a comma?
• "CERN OpenData" --> CERN Open Data portal (add reference)

4 Conclusions

• "friendly journals (i.e., JOSS)" --> use "e.g." or is this really the only available choice?
• "Use of Zenodo archives is common in HEP" --> Is it? Some people do it, but it's not really common?
• Not sure why "Accessibility" would require CITATION.cff, all that matters for accessbility is that the code is available? You probably want to argue that by properly citing software, one can understand what software has entered to obtain the result or something like that?

References:

• Can you make the arXiv links clickable and/or clearly label them as arXiv?
• In general, would be nice to have a somewhat consistent style, use DOIs if available and make them clickable?
• Use consistent spelling of Sjöstrand (e.g. [13] vs. [14])
• [19] format URL as hyperlink
• [21] Are there no proceedings you could reference instead?

[matthewfeickert]

In PR https://github.com/matthewfeickert-papers/chep-2023-proceedings-software-citation/pull/10/ all the comments have been addressed that can be. For those that were not, here are the reasons why.

• "and the associated credit it provides" --> unclear what "it" refers to, please adjust

I'm not sure how to make this more clear without doing something awkward like writing "software citation" twice within 5 words, so I've placed the relevant phrase in bracketing commas.

• "INSPIRE HEP Zenodo community" --> misses a comma?

No, this is a Zenodo community: https://zenodo.org/communities/inspire

• "CERN OpenData" --> CERN Open Data portal (add reference)

Done, but not adding a reference as it isn't a critical component to the proceedings and if the CERN Open Data portal was to get a reference then all the examples given in https://github.com/matthewfeickert-papers/chep-2023-proceedings-software-citation/blob/3e6a9b12a88d2b0865c1a74883be03eda947505c/src/current_state.tex#L39 should too, and they do not need them.

Not sure why "Accessibility" would require CITATION.cff, all that matters for accessbility is that the code is available? You probably want to argue that by properly citing software, one can understand what software has entered to obtain the result or something like that?

No, this is the wrong definition of accessibility. This is covered in the introduction as well as the sentence in question which discusses metadata and citation discovery tools.

• Can you make the arXiv links clickable and/or clearly label them as arXiv?
• In general, would be nice to have a somewhat consistent style, use DOIs if available and make them clickable?

No, the BibTeX style is defined in the webofc.cls which we can not change. It is not reasonable to ask for authors to alter the journal and INSPIRE provided citations to deliberately change the journal style (not saying you are, but just pointing out a shortcoming of the way that the journal forces this, as I don't like the style either).

• [21] Are there no proceedings you could reference instead?

No, Daniel S. Katz did not write proceedings for CHEP 2018 as can be see on the proceedings website: https://www.epj-conferences.org/articles/epjconf/abs/2019/19/contents/contents.html.