Add `CITATION.cff` Citation File Format file to repo
See original GitHub issueDescription
@lukasheinrich @kratsg GitHub now will add a citation button to repositories that have a Citation File Format file (CITATION.cff) on the default branch. This seems pretty good in general for citation of software. Also Zenodo has now added support for CITATION.cff for linked GitHub repositories, which means that we can probably deprecate our .zenodo.json in favor of a CITATION.cff.
However, it seems that it is now a smooth replacement in all areas, especially as pyhf is trying to be careful about how people cite the software so that we get consistent citations and that people cite the JOSS paper at the same time.
On my fork of pyhf I’ve been playing around with the CFF file format and the following
cff-version: 1.1.0
message: "Please cite the following works when using this software."
type: software
authors:
- family-names: "Heinrich"
given-names: "Lukas"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4048-7584"
- family-names: "Feickert"
given-names: "Matthew"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4124-7862"
- family-names: "Stark"
given-names: "Giordon"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6616-3433"
title: "scikit-hep/pyhf: v0.6.2"
version: 0.6.2
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1169739
repository-code: "https://github.com/scikit-hep/pyhf"
url: "https://pyhf.readthedocs.io/en/v0.6.2/"
keywords:
- python
- physics
- statistics
- fitting
- scipy
- numpy
- tensorflow
- pytorch
- jax
- auto-differentiation
license: "Apache-2.0"
references:
- type: article
authors:
- family-names: "Heinrich"
given-names: "Lukas"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4048-7584"
- family-names: "Feickert"
given-names: "Matthew"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4124-7862"
- family-names: "Stark"
given-names: "Giordon"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6616-3433"
- family-names: "Cranmer"
given-names: "Kyle"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5769-7094"
title: "pyhf: pure-Python implementation of HistFactory statistical models"
doi: 10.21105/joss.02823
url: "https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02823"
year: 2021
publisher: The Open Journal
volume: 6
number: 58
pages: 2823
journal: Journal of Open Source Software
produces a window like (notice that the message seems to get overwritten by GitHub)

and the copied citation gives
@misc{Heinrich_scikitheppyhf_v0.6.2_2021,
author = {Heinrich, Lukas and Feickert, Matthew and Stark, Giordon},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1169739},
month = {6},
title = {scikit-hep/pyhf: v0.6.2},
url = {https://github.com/scikit-hep/pyhf},
year = {2021}
}
which is a bit different from our preferred citation (of just the software) of
and doesn’t get the reference citation for the JOSS paper
at all.
There’s also no CFF validator that I know of as well that will check that everything is valid. Given that we’ve got our .zenodo.json config file setup so that we know that it works (thanks to help from @lnielsen) we should be careful to not break Zenodo with this new format.
Example libraries that are using the CITATION.cff now
Similar ongoing discussion on the topic
Other related references
- Citation File Format website
- Citation File Format repo
- GitHub Docs: About CITATION files
- Unfortunately, GitHub is currently showing a
cff-version: 1.2.0that is invalid, as the latest CFF release is1.1.0
- Unfortunately, GitHub is currently showing a
Issue Analytics
- State:
- Created 2 years ago
- Comments:11 (11 by maintainers)

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@matthewfeickert The best is you report it on the Zenodo support line: https://zenodo.org/support
Thanks Lars!