[Scea91]

There are valid reasons to cite software, but just 'using it' is not a good reason to request citation in a paper. The software package needs to be somehow relevant to paper's content. Why cite a tool for running experiments in parallel when the paper is about breast cancer research? Not every AI paper needs to cite PyTorch.

Proper place where to surface such software dependencies is not in the paper but in the open source code released together with the paper.

[legostormtroopr]

Many open-source libraries are developed and maintained by academia,and academia often insists that citation reach is a metric for impact and job security. Using an open-source library or tool might be the critical difference between producing research results or not.

Software is applied computation research, and if using a published research method is enough to warrant citation, then using an open-source library certainly warrants inclusion.

If the world isn't going to come up with ways to monetarily fund open-source, giving open-source developers the tools to help them compete in academia is a great move.

[latortuga]

Counterpoint: not everything on Github is software. The linked instructions use the phrasing "let them cite your work". You might use Github as a canonical source for, say, a data dump. Or really any kind of non-software information. This would be a useful way to allow folks to cite your work.