bibtex-sw-entry
Rationale
Software is a research output that must be cited like articles and data.
This repository contains a proposal for software-specific BibTeX entries in order to facilitate the citation of software projects, together with a reference implementation:
- the original white paper is swentry.org;
- the reference BibLaTeX implementation is in the biblatex folder;
- the documentation of the BibLaTeX implementation is software-biblatex.pdf;
- the issues in this repository track ongoing discussions.
Key issues
To enable proper citation of software artefacts, using systems like BibTeX, we need to address the following separate but related issues.
Data model
The key question here is: what is the subset of software metadata needed for producing a citation?
It is a key question, as the data model needs to be able to store all the information one may need to prepare a properly formatted citation. For this, we need to consider what a citation should look like. A list of references to existing examples and approaches can be found in the document citation-styles.org
We do not need to represent in a BibTeX entry all the possible metadata for
software: the idea is to keep at hand everything needed for producing a proper
citation in all contexts of interest, and rely on a link to an external source
for the rest. As an example, the affiliations of the authors are an important
part of the software metadata, like they are for article metadata, but we do
not want to show them in a citation, so we do not store them in a BibTeX record.
The current proposal for the data model consists of the list of fields presented in swentry.org
Representation of the data model
The key question here is: what new entries should we have in BibTeX for software?
A simple approach would be to complete the @software BibTeX entry already
present in biblatex (currently handled like @misc) with all the fields
identified for the data model.
To avoid creating multiple slightly different copies of a @software entry,
we have instead proposed the four entry types @software, @softwareversion,
@softwaremodule, @codefragment connected with a crossref field. Of
course, it will be possible to merge all the information into a single entry,
collapsing the chain, if needed.
View of a software citation
The key question here is: how should the data from the data model be used in an article citation?
This is a matter of bibliographic style, that can be described
using the Citation Style Language, or in a BibTeX style (using any of the
bibtex, biblatex, biber tools around).
A reference BibLaTeX implementation is now available in the biblatex folder;