On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Matthew Jadud <mja...@allegheny.edu> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:07, Joel Sherrill <joel.sherr...@gmail.com> wrote: >> algorithm research. He is asking the proper way to cite a FOSS project. >> I know the MLA has rules for websites but we are not just a website. :) > > One answer could be that you should provide a BibTeX citation on your > website, and make it clear for people how to cite your work.
Good idea. Whatever it turns out to be, a preferred reference is nice. >That > might be a citation to a journal or conference paper that introduces > the project. This came up in the PLT Scheme project not too long ago, > and the end of the thread (from a member of the PLT team) was that > they cite a particular paper. > > http://list.cs.brown.edu/pipermail/plt-scheme/2009-July/034387.html > > If you don't have publications about the project, then perhaps > providing a citation for the user manual and/or documentation. This > amounts to a URL citation, in some ways. Our project is old and the first published paper was 20 years ago. It is available online in DTIC (Defense Technical Information Center). There was another paper from ~1995 but also quite out of date. > If you don't have documentation, then cite the URL of the project. Or > perhaps your repository is the preferred point of reference? Multiple manuals in the set. Some people have referenced the main user's manual but often include a version in the reference so hard to track. > If you don't have a good URL, then it's probably going to be difficult > to cite the project. We have a good URL. Will a URL reference show up in when seeing what is referenced via CiteSeer? This seems like the most stable and appropriate reference. You can hit the docs, wiki, source, etc from there. > I don't claim that any of these are authoritative, but this is the > search procedure I go through when I'm trying to cite something like > this. This might be one of those situations that if you don't tell > your community what you want, then it will be difficult to track what > your impact is. Providing them with a definitive citation will make it > easier to track your impact in environments like the ACM digital > library, CiteSeer, and so on. Thank you a lot. I hadn't considered we would want to track the references. That will make it easier to find applications in the future. > Spending 2 cents one email at a time, > Matt > _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
