Academic citation for Python

[Andrew Dalke]

Peter Hansen:
>Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?

"to cite" in context of an academic publication means two things.
First, the acknowledgement must be in the form acceptable by the
publication.  For example, the MLA has a long list of descriptions
of accepted ways to format different sources.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for academics, it means the
specific information source, if there is more than one.  For example,
in one project I worked on we said

  The authors request that any published work which utilizes VMD please
  include the following reference:
   Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual Molecular
   Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38

In this way we could track which people published papers using our
work.  (There are services which most research libraries provide
to do this type of citation searches.)  We used this partially to
justify our funding.

Like it or not, many academic careers are affected by "impact factors"
which are a measure of importance of a paper, based partially on the
number of citations to the paper.  A researcher would prefer seeing
N cites to one paper rather than N cites to M papers, because it suggests
that paper had a higher impact.

As to how to cite Python...  I don't know.  Most things I've seen
(I just did a search) just point to python.org .  One paper I have
uses Mark Lutz's "Programming Python" book, but I wouldn't regard
that as the proper citation.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com