[thomasahle]

> it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research.

Thia is true, but it also makes it very hard for academics and PhD students who mainly write software over papers. They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia.

If we had a better practice of citing central software we use - at least the academic software that wants to be cited - we could have a more flourishing ecosystem of such software funded by the universities.

[dahart]

I can understand that, and I can understand Ole’s request for citations - Googling him it looks like he is (or has been) employed by a university.

The good news is that the new ‘tradition’ these days for academic software is to open-source all the software written for a paper or academic project, so practically everything done is visible on github & arxiv.

[gorjusborg]

> They get no citations and eventually have to leave academia.

You're welcome?

Seriously though, adding the citation nag to software is two wrongs not making a right.

As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution. If they can't figure it out, finding a greener pasture makes a lot of sense.

[thomasahle]

> As a software user, it isn't my fault academia hasn't figured out how to reward software contribution.

If you're not writing papers, the citation notification isn't for you. Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

[gorjusborg]

> Can't you just mute it and continue using the software without worries?

It _seems_ like a reasonable thing to ask, it's a minor inconvenience, really, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the behavior doesn't fit the unix philosophy. Tools are meant to do one thing, and do it well. They get composed in pipelines to get jobs done. In these pipelines, the communication medium is text, via stdin/stdout/stderr. If a tool is unpredictable in what it puts out via text, it can make the whole pipeline unpredictable, or at least more complicated.

If it _was_ okay, we should welcome everyone putting nag features in these simple cli tools, right? Well, I'd be on board with that as long as I can blanket disable all of them. If not, let's just leave our political/professional/begging messaging outside our computing tools. Okay?

[specialist]

Like a colophon for research?