search

openjournals / joss

The Journal of Open Source Software
https://joss.theoj.org
MIT License
1.55k stars 187 forks source link

Standards for no-author and undated material #607

Open jedbrown opened 5 years ago

jedbrown commented 5 years ago

It's not uncommon to see material (often other software packages) that surely should be cited and perhaps even has a citation suggestion on their websites, but where there is no date and/or no named authors.

Some list the author as "Foo Team", which results in the citation "(Team, n.d.)" and "Team, F. n.d." in the references. This can be improved via extra braces in paper.bib:

author = {{Foo Team}},

Some journals have citation standards that require the author field be non-empty. I see some just add the current year on otherwise-undated web-page references. (This seems reasonable for continuously-updated software documentation.)

I believe there is some variability in how JOSS editors handle these cases and think it would be useful to specify JOSS preferences, perhaps next to the example paper.

arfon commented 5 years ago

Thanks for flagging this @jedbrown!

So just to be clear, are you saying if the author field has extra braces (e.g. author = {{Foo Team}}) then the n.d. doesn't show up?

arfon commented 5 years ago

Also, / cc https://github.com/openjournals/joss/pull/554 as this feels related.

jedbrown commented 5 years ago

No, but the extra braces enable (Foo Team, n.d.). We have to add a date to get rid of the n.d.. I don't know under what circumstances n.d. should be allowed, versus replaced with a concrete data. I think some projects don't mention the date because they don't want to maintain it each year and/or would like citations to not fragment across versions.