About Citation Files on GitHub

This looks really useful, but one thing I wish citation managers would consolidate around is a well-defined format for citation data, such as CSL-JSON [^1]. I have regretfully never seen CITATION.cff files anywhere else, but CSL-JSON seems to see concerted efforts from:<p>* Zotero, with BetterBibTex plugin [^2]<p>* pandoc, through its updated citeproc library [^3]<p>* the citation plugin for Obsidian, which uses CSL-JSON [^4]<p>This might in the end be my personal preference, but a standardized JSON format (which is just as easily adaptable to YAML [^5]) seems much easier to parse and modify than Bibtex, with its sheer complexity. If we want to have the ability to easily cite <i>anything</i>, then this direction of standardization, I believe, is a must.<p>[^1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citation-style-language&#x2F;schema#csl-json-schema" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citation-style-language&#x2F;schema#csl-json-s...</a><p>[^2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retorque.re&#x2F;zotero-better-bibtex&#x2F;exporting&#x2F;pandoc&#x2F;#use-csl-not-bibtex-with-pandoc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;retorque.re&#x2F;zotero-better-bibtex&#x2F;exporting&#x2F;pandoc&#x2F;#u...</a><p>[^3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jgm&#x2F;citeproc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jgm&#x2F;citeproc</a><p>[^4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hans&#x2F;obsidian-citation-plugin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hans&#x2F;obsidian-citation-plugin</a><p>[^5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citation-style-language&#x2F;schema&#x2F;issues&#x2F;278" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;citation-style-language&#x2F;schema&#x2F;issues&#x2F;278</a>

Count me mystified as to why there needs to be another format for citations.<p>There are orgs doing super heavy lifting like crossref and orcid to make discovery as data better while google etc make things worse by encouraging discovery as content without offering standard outputs.<p>At least in this case, Github will output standards in the UI, but it would be much better to encourage storage in those formats too, instead of adding one.

There are valid reasons to cite software, but just &#x27;using it&#x27; is not a good reason to request citation in a paper. The software package needs to be somehow relevant to paper&#x27;s content. Why cite a tool for running experiments in parallel when the paper is about breast cancer research? Not every AI paper needs to cite PyTorch.<p>Proper place where to surface such software dependencies is not in the paper but in the open source code released together with the paper.

That&#x27;s a good idea, citing repos or worse, websites really ought to have a proper citation format.

I recently tried searching for the name of my main open source package on Google Scholar and was delighted to find it had been referenced by a few papers! I recommend doing that with your own projects, you never know what you might find.

Is there a JS library which adds robust support for citations to webpages?<p>If MathJax&#x2F;KaTeX is the Javascript version of LaTeX math mode, then what&#x27;s the Javascript version of Bib(La)TeX?

That&#x27;s perfect. This is first step for combining research with general development and I am sure the integration will become much stronger soon. Cheers!

I had never heard of using a @software citation, I always just used @misc... Does it work everywhere?

I&#x27;ve used Zenodo to generate cite-able archives of Github projects. This is interesting though!