Software Citation Principles
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Digital Libraries, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Software citation, Software credit, Attribution
- Copyright
- © 2016 Smith et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Software Citation Principles. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2169v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2169v2
Abstract
Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focussed on data citation, this document summarizes the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group and its activities between June 2015 and April 2016. Based on a review of existing community practices, the goal of the working group was to produce a consolidated set of citation principles that may encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines and venues. Our work is presented here as a set of software citation principles, a discussion of the motivations for developing the principles, reviews of existing community practice, and a discussion of the requirements these principles would place upon different stakeholders. Working examples and possible technical solutions for how these principles can be implemented will be discussed in a separate paper.
Author Comment
Additional discussion and references were added in Section 4.1 to improve the description of workshops held on the topic of software citation. In addition, a few grammatical and reference errors were corrected.