Allowing a package to be cited

Offtopic
1

Any thoughts here on what are currently the best options to allow people to cite a package that you have created?

I know of

Zenodo

Pros
Easy and also stores the code.

Cons
Is mostly ignored by Google Scholar.

Preprint repository such as arXiv

Pros
Reasonably easy

Cons
Need to write a LaTeX document LaTeX, HTML or PDF document.

Peer-reviewed publication

Pros
Looks nice

Cons
Takes long

Book

Obvious pro’s and con’s. I mention this because, for example, ggplot2 does this.

EDIT: Related article happened to be posted on Slack just now by Mathieu Besançon: https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.745.

EDIT2: There is also https://f1000research.com/

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2

Can’t you just cite the Github repo?

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3

In our department, people who are editors and reviewers don’t like that. A software package appears more legitimate if it has a “real” publication.

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4

Shouldn’t the original question be changed to “Where to publish a paper about a software package?” then?

5

I would say that a short open source journal paper is a pretty good choice for this topic.
Available on google scholar, writing markdown is enough, and takes relatively short.
David Sanders gave a talk to introduce the journal of open source software.

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6

There is an interesting discussion on and around this topic here:
http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/745
“Software Must be Recognised as an Important Output of Scholarly Research”

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7

JOSS? https://joss.theoj.org/
The LaTeX document required can be fairly brief.

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8

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) has some benefits including

  • Relatively short review times
  • An academic journal
  • Indexed by Google Scholar
  • Interactive review process
  • Developer friendly, on GitHub
  • Markdown with LaTeX features
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9

ArXiv accepts but does not require LaTeX. You can submit pdf or even html.

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