This document provides a minimal, generic checklist that developers of software (either open or closed source) used in research can use to ensure they are following good practice around software citation. This will help developers get credit for the software they create, and improve transparency, reproducibility, and reuse

Allen, Alice

Bouquin, Daina

Chue Hong, Neil P.

Crick, Tom

Crosas, Mercè

de Waard, Anita

Druskat, Stephan

Edmunds, Scott

Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra

Haines, Robert

Harrison, Melissa

Hausman, Jessica

Hwang, Lorraine

Jones, Catherine

Jones, Matthew B.

Katz, Daniel S.

Kennedy, David

Löwe, Peter

Morrell, Tom

Pollard, Tom

Robinson, Carly

Ryder, Gerry

Smith, Arfon M.

Stall, Shelley

Swaminathan, Sowmya

Wu, Mingfang

English

Gonzalez-Beltran

ZENODO

Software Citation Checklist for Developers

Institute of Transport Research:Publications

Software Citation Checklist for DevelopersProduced by the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working GroupEditor: Neil Chue Hong (ORCID: 0000-0002-8876-7606).Contributors: Alice Allen (ORCID: 0000-0003-3477-2845), Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran (ORCID: 0000-0003-3499-8262), Anita de Waard (ORCID: 0000-0002-9034-4119), Arfon M. Smith (ORCID: 0000-0002-3957-2474), Carly Robinson(ORCID: 0000-0002-8523-1478), Catherine Jones (ORCID: 0000-0002-5112-835X),Daina Bouquin (ORCID: 0000-0003-2626-3688) , Daniel S. Katz (ORCID: 0000-0001-5934-7525), David Kennedy (ORCID: 0000-0002-9377-0797), Gerry Ryder(ORCID: 0000-0001-7444-4489), Jessica Hausman (ORCID: 0000-0002-1861-1526), Lorraine Hwang (ORCID: 0000-0002-1021-3101), Matthew B. Jones (OR-CID: 0000-0003-0077-4738), Melissa Harrison (ORCID: 0000-0003-3523-4408),Mercè Crosas (ORCID: 0000-0003-1304-1939), Mingfang Wu (ORCID: 0000-0003-1206-3431), Peter Löwe (ORCID: 0000-0003-2257-0517), Robert Haines (ORCID:0000-0002-9538-7919), Scott Edmunds (ORCID: 0000-0001-6444-1436), ShelleyStall (ORCID: 0000-0003-2926-8353), Sowmya Swaminathan (ORCID: 0000-0002-0285-4910), Stephan Druskat (ORCID: 0000-0003-4925-7248), Tom Crick(ORCID: 0000-0001-5196-9389), Tom Morrell (ORCID: 0000-0001-9266-5146),Tom Pollard (ORCID: 0000-0002-5676-7898).DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3482769BackgroundThis document provides a minimal, generic checklist that developers of software(either open or closed source) used in research can use to ensure they are followinggood practice around software citation. This will help developers get credit forthe software they create, and improve transparency, reproducibility, and reuse.Checklist for making a release of your software citable• Have I assigned an appropriate license to my software?• Have I described my software properly, using an appropriate metadataformat, and included this metadata file with my software?– Have I given my software a clear version number?– Have I determined the authors to be credited for this release of mysoftware, and included this in my metadata file?• Have I procured a persistent identifier for this release of my software?• Have I added my recommended citation to the documentation for mysoftware?1There are other things that we consider as good practice for research softwaredevelopment which are not directly related to making software citable - theseare described in the Additional Guidance below.LicenseThis guidance is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike4.0 International license. You are free to share and adapt this material forany purpose, including commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit,provide a link to the license, indicate if changes were made, and you distributeyour contributions under the same license as the original. More information:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/Additional Guidance on Software Citation for DevelopersWhy is software citation important?Software is part of the research process, across a wide range of disciplinesand domains, and it is therefore important that pieces of software that havecontributed to the research are cited.Software citation is vital in the acknowledgment of the crucial role of softwarein research, as it allows researchers publishing software rather than papers toparticipate in the academic credit system.The scholarly communications system that underpins research relies on accuratecitations to ensure research integrity, give appropriate credit and show depen-dencies with other works. As one step towards reproducing a computationalprocedure, researchers need to be able to access all inputs to the procedureincluding the specific version of software packages used to produce the originalresults. Research software should be as open as possible to enable traceabilityand reproducibility of research results.Members of the FORCE11 community, representing authors, developers, re-searchers, publishers and funders, have published the Software Citation Guide-lines [1] to encourage broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citationacross disciplines and venues. This checklist aims to provide guidance to makeit easier to implement these principles as a developer.What is an appropriate license?Open source license guidance is readily available [2]. Choose a license that meetsyour needs, and that of your community of users.2What are appropriate metadata formats?The CodeMeta.json format [3] captures software metadata, and is understood bya growing number of digital repositories, It is also easy to convert this to manycommon metadata schema used by software repositories.The Citation File Format (CFF) [4] is a human- and machine-readable file formatin YAML 1.2 which provides citation metadata for software.Your community may already have a recommended metadata format for softwaremetadata.How do I give a clear version number?We recommend using semantic versioning [5].How do I procure a persistent identifier for my software release?The easiest way of getting a persistent identifier is to deposit your sourcecode in a digital repository which accepts software and issues Digital ObjectIdentifiers (DOIs). Zenodo’s integration with GitHub [6] makes this easier to doautomatically, but you can also manually deposit it into a repository.Where should I add my recommended citation to the documentationfor my software?We recommend placing your recommended citation in your README file or aseparate CITATION file. This should be done using the standard citation stylefor your community.Example from astronomy, with text in the README file asking peo-ple to cite both the package and a paper Software citation:Angeline Burrell, Christer van der Meeren, & Karl M. Laundal.(2019, September 19). aburrell/aacgmv2: Version 2.5.2 (Version2.5.2). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3451419Recommended citation from the README file:When referencing this package, please cite both the package DOI(10.5281/zenodo.3451419) and the AACGM-v2 journal article:Shepherd, S. G. (2014), Altitude-adjusted corrected geomagneticcoordinates: Definition and functional approximations, Jour-nal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 119, 7501–7521,doi:10.1002/2014JA020264.3Example from mathematics, providing people with a BibTeX snippetin a CITATION file Software citation:Vince Knight, & Ria Baldevia. (2018, January 31). drvinceknight/Nashpy:v0.0.13 (Version v0.0.13). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1163694Here is how this project has put the citation as a BibTeX snippet in a CITATIONfile: https://github.com/drvinceknight/Nashpy/blob/v0.0.13/CITATION.mdPlease use the following to cite the latest version of the Nashpy library:@misc{axelrodproject,author = {{ {The Nashpy project developers} }}title = {Nashpy: <RELEASE TITLE>},month = <MONTH>,year = <YEAR>,doi = {<DOI INFORMATION>},url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.<DOI NUMBER>}}To check the details (RELEASE TITLE, DOI INFORMATION and DOI NUMBER)please view the Zenodo page for the project.How should I determine authorship?Determining authorship is still best done by the project, considering whichpeople have contributed to a release, and may change with each release.Additional guidanceAdditional guidance is available from https://research-software.org/citation/developers [7]References1. Smith, Arfon M., Katz, Daniel S., Niemeyer, Kyle E., & FORCE11 SoftwareCitation Working Group. (2016). Software citation principles. PeerJComputer Science, 2, e86. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.862. Choose a License: https://choosealicense.com/3. Matthew B. Jones, Carl Boettiger, Abby Cabunoc Mayes, Arfon Smith,Peter Slaughter, Kyle Niemeyer, Yolanda Gil, Martin Fenner, KrzysztofNowak, Mark Hahnel, Luke Coy, Alice Allen, Mercè Crosas, Ashley Sands,Neil Chue Hong, Patricia Cruse, Daniel S. Katz, Carole Goble. 2017.4CodeMeta: an exchange schema for software metadata. Version 2.0. KNBData Repository. doi:10.5063/schema/codemeta-2.04. Druskat, Stephan, Chue Hong, Neil, Haines, Robert, & Baker, James.(2018, August 29). Citation File Format (CFF) - Specifications (Version1.0.3-3). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14056795. Preston-Werner, Tom. (2013). Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 https://semver.org/6. Making Your Code Citable https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/7. Druskat, Stephan. (2018). Research software citation for software develop-ers. https://research-software.org/citation/developers5

Software Citation Checklist for Developers

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