Citing software

Software has become a crucial part of scientific research, yet it is not cited or credited as often and as easily as traditional research outputs. However, it is important to properly cite software, for many reasons, among which:

Understanding Research Fields: Software is a product of research, and by not citing it, we leave holes in the record of research of progress in those fields.

Recognition: Academic researchers at all levels, including students, postdocs, faculty, and staff, should be credited for the software products they develop and contribute to, particularly when those products enable or further research done by others. Non-academic researchers should also be credited for their software work, though the specific forms of credit are different than for academic researchers. Furthermore, citations can be tracked, which allows for more accurate assessment of the software's impact: who uses it, and what projects does it contribute to?

Discovering Software: Citations enable the specific software used in a research product to be found. Additional researchers can then use the same software for different purposes, leading to credit for those responsible for the software.

Reproducibility: Citation of specific software used is a crucial step in allowing other researchers to reproduce your results, although it is not sufficient. Additional information such as configurations and platform issues are also needed. Accurate information about the software — and its version! — used in your research is necessary for others to obtain and use the same software, making it easier to validate and build upon your research.

In this module, we will further illustrate the importance of software citation, and we will demonstrate how scientific software can be cited, and how to facilitate this as the author of scientific software. Here, you will be introduced to the file type CITATION.cff, which was developed especially for this purpose. :::