Replacing CITATION.bib with a standard metadata format

Tooling
4

It was easier than I thought. Here is a Julia function to convert a DOI into BibTeX:

using HTTP

doi2bib(doi::AbstractString) =
    String(HTTP.get("http://data.crossref.org/$doi",
                    ["Accept" => "application/x-bibtex"]).body)

For example,

julia> print(doi2bib("10.5334/jors.151"))

@article{Rackauckas_2017,
	doi = {10.5334/jors.151},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.5334%2Fjors.151},
	year = 2017,
	month = {may},
	publisher = {Ubiquity Press, Ltd.},
	volume = {5},
	author = {Christopher Rackauckas and Qing Nie},
	title = {{DifferentialEquations}.jl {\textendash} A Performant and Feature-Rich Ecosystem for Solving Differential Equations in Julia},
	journal = {Journal of Open Research Software}
}

Note that there are a variety of ways to get a DOI for software besides a traditional publication, e.g. via Zenodo, and it is becoming increasingly popular.

Note also that, since the citation field of CodeMeta is just a URL, we could easily support various common citation URLs in addition to DOIs:

  1. for doi.org URLs (DOIs), use doi2bib
  2. for github.com URLs, generate a @misc bibitem citing the URL, perhaps using the github API to fetch top contributors as authors.
  3. for arxiv.org URLs, use the arXiv API
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