add citation.cff to repo

GitHub now supports a “cite this repository” functionality. We should consider adding a citation.cff file to enable it for this repo. More info here:

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1420122675813441540

cc @adam2392 (in case you want this for mne-connectivity) cc @sappelhoff (for mne-bids) cc @hoechenberger (for mne-bids-pipeline)

[mmagnuski]

Thanks for the summary @drammock, I agree with your points and all the other comments here and think it is a good idea to add citation.cff and recommend citing the software and the paper.

@hoechenberger I agree its not always easy to cite software in academic papers, but things are changing. eLife is a good example of a journal accepting software citations - we had no trouble citing github code repositories in our last paper there (these citations show in the bibliography with a small grey text saying “software”). As @cbrnr mentions - we have to keep pushing and demand software citations with every paper we publish 😃 After reading this thread I am commited to cite every significant piece of software (and not just the papers) in my future publications. 🚀

[drammock]

I think the intent is clearly to make it easy to cite the software itself instead of a canonical paper, but it is possible to include info about canonical papers into the CITATION.cff file too (in an optional references section). You can also customize the message that appears in the little GitHub flyout box, so it would be possible to draw attention to any included canonical refs.

I’ve had a few conversations with @larsoner and @agramfort about the issue of “cite the paper vs cite the software” over the last year. If I may summarize the two perspectives that are most in tension:

• having a canonical citation avoids citation dilution / makes it easier to quantify impact over time
• later contributors get no credit / benefit from the canonical citation, so a unique citation for each software release is more equitable / fair (as long as the author list includes all contributors, not just contributors since last release)

Here are my personal comments:

1. The impression I’m getting from my (admittedly somewhat limited) interactions with the open science / open data communities is that most of those folks prefer / encourage citations of the software itself rather than a canonical paper (or at least, citing the canonical journal paper should be in addition to citing the software itself).
2. MNE-Python already has 2 “canonical” citations, which already makes it very hard to quantify impact (e.g., we don’t know how many papers cite us because we don’t have a good way of detecting which papers cite both of our canonical refs and counting them once vs twice). Having to deal with citations of the software itself doesn’t seem like it would make the problem that much worse than it already is.
3. fairness / giving contributors credit is important, regardless of whether they contributed before or after the canonical journal pub. I would even make the stronger claim that there is something akin to exploitation happening when some people (authors on the canonical paper) benefit from the work of others who are not given credit in that way. At the time there was no realistic alternative, but now that there is a relatively easy way to give credit more equitably, I think we should do so.

To drive home the point: the Frontiers paper has 11 authors, but the all-time # 4 contributor to MNE-Python (by number of commits) is @jaeilepp, who is not among those 11 authors. Neither is @jona-sassenhagen (# 7), @kingjr (# 8), myself (# 11), nor @GuillaumeFavelier (# 12).

The last time we talked about this, I think I convinced @agramfort to at least allow us to recommend citing both the software and the canonical journal papers. The upshot of that was adding codemeta.json to the repo, but I never got around to the subsequent step of making it easy for people to convert that into a copy-pastable citation, and then altering our docs to update our recommendation. This new integration now makes that next step easier.

Thoughts?