What is Software Citation?

When you put large amounts of resources into developing software, it is important to get credit for your efforts. Software that is intended to be used by others should receive the necessary acknowledgement and recognition it deserves.

We are all used to citing academic papers and acknowledging the funders of our work. We are getting used to citing data to acknowledge the enablers of our scientific inquiry and to improve transparency, traceability, and reproducibility. But how often do we cite software, arguably as important to our work as data, but foundationally important to reproducibility?

We are at an important time of discovery and collaboration, where software forms a critical thread in our work, and it should be cited when we use it or it should be made citeable if we develop and create it.

At NCAR we produce hundreds of public software packages on Github alone and countless more elsewhere, and while not all of these packages are intended for serious use, the ones’ that are should be citeable so that due attribution and appropriate traceability can be part of the new foundation for our science.

This site provides guidance and resources for understanding how to cite software and make your own software citeable and available to the broader communities it serves.

About the source of these recommendations

With over 500 repositories in the NCAR Github organization repository https://github.com/NCAR, there was an obvious opportunity to understand the current landscape of open scientific software within the organization. In the first quarter of 2020, a brief software citation survey was developed to understand the needs of scientific software producers (and consumers) at NCAR. This site is a result of that survey which focused on questions about citation practices, persistent identifiers for software, licensing, tools and platforms supporting software archiving, among other things. The survey provided community feedback necessary for refining the recommendations here.