Tools: Add citation information following the citation file format

[sven1103]

Here at BOSC CodeFest, we got encouraged to use the human and machine-readable citation file format CFF, which provides citation metadata for software.

Please have a look at the current specification of CFF.

I want to bring this up here, so we can discuss if we want to incorporate this in our tools and pipeline repositories.

I know that @mkuzak and others are working on a Zotero browser plugin that reads CFF files to add it automatically in the bibliography. Changes are, that for other reference managers this will be possible too.

What do you think?

[ewels]

Sounds good! How does this compare to .bib bibTex files? Those have been around forever and are supported everywhere.

Should probably be implemented as part of https://github.com/nf-core/tools/issues/236 - that one started to get a bit complicated and stalled..

[sven1103]

I think the bibTex specification does not cover software as a native entry type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX#Entry_types

If you have a look at the current CFF core specification, it is targeted for software. Entries like:

• license
• copyright
• repository
• repository-code
• repository-artifact
• software-container
• orcid
• ....

are some i just cherry-picked which I found super useful. You can even reference a git commit hash!

[ewels]

Nice! 👍

[MaxUlysse]

Should be easy enough to cover both, no?

[vsmalladi]

Have you guys checked the CSL style out: https://citationstyles.org/developers/

Used it for Manubot: https://github.com/manubot/manubot

[mkuzak]

@vsmalladi if I understand correctly, CSL is another way to add citation information in a machine-readable way, it deas not address software citation per se. Is that correct?

[vsmalladi]

Yes that is correct. It’s a option so that we can store citation and export to journal specific format

[mkuzak]

Alternative option is codemeta, it has a lot of crosswalks to other systems