On Sat, 9 May 2009, roger koenker wrote:
I've had an email exchange with the authors of a recent paper
in Nature who also made a good faith effort to cite both R and the quantreg
package, and were told that the Nature "house style" didn't allow such
citations so they were dropped from the published paper and the
"supplementary material" appearing on the Nature website.
Interesting. Software manuals with an ISBN are not good enough for the
Nature "house style"? I wonder what the problem with that could be...
Since the CRAN website makes a special effort to make prior versions of
packages available, it would seem to me to be much more useful to cite
version numbers than access dates.
Definitely, yes. Current versions of R with current versions of quantreg
for example yield:
Roger Koenker (2009). quantreg: Quantile Regression.
R package version 4.27. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=quantreg
Even if 4.27 is not current anymore it will be available under the
"archive" link at the above URL. So an access date is not necessary.
Pointing this out to the journal editors might help. If not, providing the
access date (while keeping all other information) won't do any damage.
There are serious questions about the
ephemerality of url citations, not all of which are adequately resolved
by the Wayback machine, and access dating, but it would be nice to
have some better standards for such contingent citations rather than
leave authors at the mercy of copy editors. I would also be interested in
suggestions by other contributors.
I wouldn't be aware of good generally applicable standards of citing
software. The default output of citation() has been chosen because
repository+package+version uniquely identify which package was used
(not unsimilar to journal+volume+pages). Also, using the URL
http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=quantreg
has the advantage that it is independent of the physical location on CRAN.
So in case the structure of the package pages on CRAN changes in the
future, the URL will still point to the relevant page with all necessary
information.
Best,
Z
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