On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 2:41 PM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 11:35 AM Ole Tange <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 9:56 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > > The --citation output now refers to a book instead of the website / > > > documentation itself: > > > > No. It refers to the 2018-book instead of the article from 2011. > > Citation has never referred to neither the website nor the included > > documentation. > > I see that now on closer inspection. The URL though was at least to > the official website, i.e. the logical place for "I used this tool", > now it's a URL for a book I have not and don't plan to read. So I'd > never cite it for anything.
If you see how other tools prefer to be cited, it is in general _not_ their website: * https://www.scipy.org/citing.html * https://octave.org/doc/interpreter/Citing-Octave-in-Publications.html (Octave has citation for individual packages, too) * https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-May/161481.html * https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/citation.html (R has citation for individual packages, too) * http://www.partek.com/citing-partek-software-in-a-publication/ * http://www.fluortools.com/misc/cite * https://www.maxqda.com/how-to-cite-maxqda * https://www.open-mpi.org/papers/ * https://www.tensorflow.org/about/bib * http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/praat.html I do not think it is in the spirit of academic tradition to refuse to cite a source, just because you got the information through a different channel. Also I find it a bit unfair to punish GNU Parallel for being so easy to use that you do not have to read either to get going. It seems to set the wrong incentives: Make the tool so hard to use that the user _has_ to read a specific part of the documentation to get going. If you like GNU Parallel and want to help funding it in the future I encourage you to cite the article or the book - even if you have not read either (opposite many articles both are available for free online so you do not need to have a physical copy to read them - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014 and https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/105438-Tange.pdf). /Ole
