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by xucheng 1759 days ago
Since many papers have existing bibtex, it would be better if GitHub either provides tools to convert bibtex to CFF or supports bibtex directly.

FWIW, bibtex is the de facto standard.
1 comments
sdruskat 1759 days ago
Not for providing citation metadata for software, where BibTeX misses important fields.
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xucheng 1759 days ago
May I ask what missing fields you are referring to? Why @online/@software/@dataset type in biblatex [1] cannot do the job?

That being said, I think GitHub should acknowledge that it is common for authors to want people cite their paper (or multiple papers) rather than simply the source code. Because this is what counts to the citation in academic. At the same time, there is no reason to not support bibtex/biblatex in addition to the cff.

[1]: See section 2.1.1 in http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/biblate...

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sdruskat 1759 days ago
@software is simply an alias for the fallback @misc, i.e., semantics are lost, no fields like different URLs for different software media (code, build artifacts, etc.), no software identifier support, etc.

Also, you can have people cite your paper on GitHub by giving them it as a preferred citation in CFF, and GitHub will render that instead of the source code. Which is, btw, against the software citation principles [1], but caters to people who need time adapting and want traditional credit now.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86

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