To support the growing adoption of the Citation File Format, there is now a dedicated tool to create these files from scratch: cffinit. Cffinit, created by the Netherlands Science Center and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), is a web application that helps you create a CITATION.cff file. The application provides guidance for each field of the CFF schema and does the validation automatically. Recently, the Netherlands eScience Center has released version 2.0.0 of the tool. 

In many research fields today, doing research without software is impossible. Researchers find an interesting problem, they devote their time to finding the answer and they rarely actually do it alone. Most of the time, they collaborate with many other people. For example, researchers need software that can make smart decisions (like an AI algorithm) or process a huge amount of data in a very efficient way.

What happened to the people who developed the software? Are they included in the paper? Did they receive credit for the software they developed? In the best scenario, the software developers spent time creating a software paper and published it in a specialized journal. If there is no publication about the software, the developers don’t usually receive credit or are only added to the acknowledgment section.

The Citation File Format helps you add machine-readable metadata for software or datasets and has been adopted by GitHub, Zenodo, GitLab, Zotero, and JabRef. You can read more about the story here. Thanks to GitHub’s recent feature, if you have a CITATION.cff in your GitHub repository, your software can be cited correctly and easily.

The Netherlands eScience Center also took part in The Turing Way November 2021 sprint and created a section about software citation with CITATION.cff with an overview of all this information. In addition, a tutorial has been created on how to create a CITATION.cff using cffinit to help you get your software to the next level of recognition. 

If you have suggestions or questions, please feel free to reach out to generalization@esciencecenter.nl. 

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About this post 

• Author: Fieke Wauters [icon name=”envelope-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]
• Categories: Research Data Management news & events
• Keywords: RDM, eScience
• Publication date: 7 February 2022 | Last updated: 8 February 2022
• Source:  Netherlands eScience Center
• License: CC-BY 4.0