4 ms·

I'm all for citing software. I still don't understand the guidelines for who to list as an author, though. In modern open source projects, you're going to hav

by Athas 5y ago

I'm all for citing software. I still don't understand the guidelines for who to list as an author, though. In modern open source projects, you're going to have a very long tail of drive-by contributors. Some of these might not even touch the software itself, but merely fix a typo in the README or similar. Should the citation list all of these? As for myself, I'm very much in favour of crediting anyone for any contribution, no matter how small, but standard scientific practice is more exclusive. And what about names? When I look at the author list that Zenodo generates for my own main project [0], it's not only very long, but contains lots of online pseudonyms and even a few duplicates, due to differences in spelling or inclusion of middle names and such. My background is in the hacker community, so I think this is great, but I don't think a journal editor would agree. I could manually curate a list of the "main authors", which would be much smaller, but I'm not particularly enthusiastic about being the arbiter of when someone's contributions are major enough to become a "main author". [0]: https://zenodo.org/record/5062209 https://zenodo.org/record/5062209

sdruskat 5y ago
This is indeed something that needs to be solved. I think the current path in the schol comms community leans towards having contributors (with different roles) as well as authors. Also, summary authors ("the <project> contributors") is one way to relatively elegantly circumvent this, and something you could do in a CFF file for example (these are being picked up by Zenodo).
- angrais 5y ago
  Why not simply cite the original creators? Then if major features changed amongst versions then the key contributors? Original creators (whose idea the software is) should be first author.
- Athas 5y ago
  As I understand it, an important point of software citations is to help academic researchers who are (unfortunately) measured by citation metrics. Will whatever tools the bean counters are using connect "the <project> contributors" citations properly to people? I don't see how they could.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  When citing collective written works (like conference paper collections), the editors’ names are usually listed. I don’t see why not do the same here: cite the maintainers’ names when citing the whole, and also specific authors when citing particular fragments.

by Athas 5y ago

sdruskat 5y ago

This is indeed something that needs to be solved. I think the current path in the schol comms community leans towards having contributors (with different roles) as well as authors. Also, summary authors ("the <project> contributors") is one way to relatively elegantly circumvent this, and something you could do in a CFF file for example (these are being picked up by Zenodo).

angrais 5y ago
Why not simply cite the original creators? Then if major features changed amongst versions then the key contributors? Original creators (whose idea the software is) should be first author.
Athas 5y ago
As I understand it, an important point of software citations is to help academic researchers who are (unfortunately) measured by citation metrics. Will whatever tools the bean counters are using connect "the <project> contributors" citations properly to people? I don't see how they could.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
When citing collective written works (like conference paper collections), the editors’ names are usually listed. I don’t see why not do the same here: cite the maintainers’ names when citing the whole, and also specific authors when citing particular fragments.