-Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focused on data citation, FORCE11 started a Software Citation Working Group (SCWG). The group initially sought members, and currently has about 5560 members. The working group reviewed existing community practices, developed a set of use cases, and drafted a software citation principles document. This presentation will discuss the principles (in brief: importance, credit and attribution, unique identification, persistence, accessibility, and specificity), how they will impact the practice of research, and they can be implemented by researchers, publishers, librarians and others who build and maintain repositories, scholars of science, university administrators, and research funders. It should also spark discussion in Track 2 of WSSSPE4 about both the next steps related to software citation and the community goals related to software credit, reproducibility, and sustainability.
Software is a critical part of modern research and yet there is little support across the scholarly ecosystem for its acknowledgement and citation. Inspired by the activities of the FORCE11 working group focused on data citation, FORCE11 started a Software Citation Working Group (SCWG). The group initially sought members, and currently has about 55–60 people (researchers, developers, publishers, repositories, librarians) as members, including members of WSSSPE3 software credit breakout group who joined en masse in October 2015.
The working group reviewed existing community practices,
including those of groups such as the Software Sustainability
Institute, WSSSPE, Project CRediT, Ontosoft, and CodeMeta,
and in domains such as astronomy and astrophysics, life
sciences, geosciences. The group then developed a set of
use cases (collaborative via a Google Doc [
This work is licensed under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
Seventeen discrete use cases related to software citation were established to help understand the necessary requirements for citation. These involve 13 stakeholder types, including researchers, research software engineers, publishers, indexers, domain groups, libraries, archives, repositories, funders, policy makers, evaluators, and citation managers. The use cases helped identify the basic metadata needed in a citation of software: unique identifier, software name, author(s), version number, release date, and location. Interestingly, only unique identifier was needed for all use cases. Beyond the principles of software citation themselves, the document contains extensive discussion about the principles and related topics. These topics include which unique identifiers should be used (DOIs are recommended), what software should be cited, the role of software papers, how to cite derived software, basic elements of a citation format in reference lists, the elimination of citation limits, the types of software that should be cited (all), and what an identifier should resolve to. In addition, the document contains a discussion of past and other work related to software citation, both in specific domains and the general research software community.
The FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group then made a set of recommendations for Software Citation Principles at the full FORCE2016 meeting April 2016. This has the goal of encouraging broad adoption of a consistent policy for software citation across disciplines and venues. The group also presented a discussion of the motivations for developing the principles, reviews of existing community practice, and a discussion of the requirements these principles would place upon different stakeholders.
Working examples and possible technical solutions for how these principles can be implemented will be discussed in a separate paper that is being developed.
After the FORCE2016 events, the working group modified
the principles document to reflect issues that were raised, and
then published the draft document on the FORCE11
website [
The final draft paper was then submitted to PeerJ Computer
Science, published in PeerJ Preprints, and posted on the
FORCE11 website [
The remaining plans of the Software Citation Working Group involve promotion and distribution of the Software Citation Principles, specifically an endorsement effort to get both individuals and organizations to sign on to the principles and related, creation of some publicity material such as an infographic and 1–3 slides. After this, the Software Citation Working Group will have completed its work and will end.
Next, we expect FORCE11 to spin up of a new working group focused on implementing the software citation principles. This group will work with institutions, publishers, funders, researchers, etc., to implement the principles established by the first group, and will write an implementation examples paper.
This presentation will discuss the principles (in brief: importance, credit and attribution, unique identification, persistence, accessibility, and specificity), how they will impact the practice of research, and they can be implemented by researchers, publishers, librarians and others who build and maintain repositories, scholars of science, university administrators, and research funders. It should also spark discussion in Track 2 of WSSSPE4 about both the next steps related to software citation and the community goals related to software credit, reproducibility, and sustainability.
The authors would like to thank all members of the
FORCE11 Software Citation Group (listed in [
Work by Daniel S. Katz was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) while working at the Foundation. Any opinion, finding, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Work by Kyle E. Niemeyer was supported in part by the NSF under grant ACI-1535065.