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by foldr 1037 days ago
> it’s not tradition to write citations for tools used to conduct research

Academics seem to have a very blinkered attitude to this. I wrote some software that was popular for a while in a niche field, and people were forever asking me to waste my time by 'publishing' the manual in some pointless journal so that they could cite something and give me credit. Writing useful software counts for less in that world than publishing another pointless paper that no-one will read.
2 comments
Symbiote 1037 days ago
A more useful option is to use Zenodo to provide a DOI for a GitHub repository.

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-r...

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foldr 1037 days ago
That doesn't really help. People already know how to paste the URL for a piece of software into a paper. It's more that it doesn't count for anything (because it's a piece of software and not a paper).
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Symbiote 1037 days ago
It does help, as the DOI system provides the tracking needed to count citations and measure the "effectiveness" of the researcher.
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foldr 1037 days ago
Such citations are not valued by $FIELD (for most values of FIELD). Only citations of published papers count.
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bee_rider 1037 days ago
That is a weird request, a source doesn’t need to be published in a journal to be cite-able. On the other hand, if you put a bibtex snippet on your site that indicates how you’d like to be cited, that is super helpful.
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foldr 1037 days ago
I wasn't very clear in my comment. I think the idea was that if the thing they were citing was a journal article, then the citations would actually mean something, as widely-cited journal articles are one of the currencies of most academic fields. While one certainly can cite an unpublished document, the author doesn't necessarily gain much from it in terms of their academic CV.

If someone writes a piece of software specifically for the purposes of doing certain types of scientific research, and then other scientists use this software to help conduct published experiments, then IMO it really ought to be possible to give that person meaningful credit for their work. It's a perfectly legitimate way to contribute to a field, even if it does not take the form of a paper. But with the system as it stands, the only way to get meaningful credit is to publish a pointless paper saying, in effect, "Hey! I wrote some software!"

>if you put a bibtex snippet on your site that indicates how you’d like to be cited, that is super helpful.

I should probably have done that, but from my point of view it didn't really matter. I have a name, and the software had a website. I didn't really mind exactly how individual people chose to cite it. The absence of a ready-baked bibtex snippet would never be accepted as an excuse for failing to cite any other kind of source.

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bee_rider 1037 days ago
I agree on all points, just trying to look at it from the other party’s point of view. But yeah, the situation with this sort of stuff is a pain.

There should be a high-prestige “journal of READMEs and User Handbooks,” haha.

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dahart 1037 days ago
Ole did provide a BibTeX entry to a USENIX magazine article about Parallel, which is fine, though I was always taught that non-journal references generally belong in footnotes or an appendix and not the bibliography, especially for something you’re not referencing for research purposes. Not sure if footnote or appendix or open-source usage citations count for what Ole needs; I’d guess he wants citations you can easily index using Google Scholar or other citation indexes, i.e. it should count toward Parallel’s H-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index)
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