[Python-ideas] Add citation() to site.py

[Nick Coghlan]

On 19 March 2016 at 00:09, Gyro Funch <gyromagnetic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/18/2016 1:41 AM, Terry Reedy wrote:
>> On 3/17/2016 7:45 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>
>>> But then again I've never cared about citations.
>>
>> Citations are not just in Bibliographies.  PEPs have them in
>> footnotes, which was a traditional place for citations, though
>> in the modern form of hyperlinks.  The tracker is full of
>> in-line citations, also in the form of hyperlinks.  The
>> formalized citation proposed by Stephen would include the URL.
>>
>
> Could 'citation' be an optional entry in setup.py instead?
> I cite software in papers I write, so having easy access to this
> information for each package I use in a given analysis would make
> this task easier.

I'd actually suggest that programmatic generation of citations for
packages distributed through PyPI would be better handled as a third
party project. Software developers that aren't themselves also
research scientists aren't going to care to provide their own citation
details, so it's best to establish a convention that doesn't rely on
software publishers doing anything they aren't already doing.

In the specific case of CPython, rather than asking Guido and the rest
of the core development team "How do you want to be cited?", it
probably makes more sense to ask "We're proposing to standardise on
citing CPython this way, are you OK with that?" (e.g. by proposing a
patch for a new "Citation" link in the meta-information on the docs
home page at https://docs.python.org/3/ ).

The reason I suggest that approach is that most (all?) of us aren't
research scientists, so we have no idea what typical conventions are
for citations, nor how those conventions are changing. However, the
docs are much easier to amend than the standard library, while still
being versioned along with the rest of the software, so adding
citation information there is a low risk way of answering the question
if folks do want to cite us.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia