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Add `CITATION.cff` Citation File Format file to repo

See original GitHub issue

Description

@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 DOI 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)

example_box

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

https://github.com/scikit-hep/pyhf/blob/8f35b102b47738fcda12c1fed30673abaa23ec68/src/pyhf/data/citation.bib#L1-L8

and doesn’t get the reference citation for the JOSS paper

https://github.com/scikit-hep/pyhf/blob/8f35b102b47738fcda12c1fed30673abaa23ec68/src/pyhf/data/citation.bib#L10-L21

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

cc @danielskatz @cranmer

Other related references

Issue Analytics

  • State:closed
  • Created 2 years ago
  • Comments:11 (11 by maintainers)

github_iconTop GitHub Comments

1reaction
lnielsencommented, Sep 7, 2021

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

0reactions
matthewfeickertcommented, Sep 7, 2021

Thanks Lars!

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