While I'm not personally in need of citations (and never felt I was) I can easily understand the point -- sometimes citations can make or break a career and having written a popular software package should be acknowledged.
Are there other languages or software communities that do something like this? It would be nice not to have to invent this wheel. Eventually a PEP and an implementation should be presented, but first the idea needs to be explored more. --Guido On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 3:30 PM Andrei Kucharavy <andrei.kuchar...@gmail.com> wrote: > Over the last 10 years, Python has slowly inched towards becoming the most > popular scientific computing language, beating or seriously challenging > Matlab, R, Mathematica and many specialized languages (S, SAS, ...) in > numerous applications. > > A large part of this growth is driven by amazing community packages, such > as numpy, scipy, scikits-learn, scikits-image, seaborn or pandas, just to > name a few. Development of such packages represents a significant time > investment by people working in academic environments. To be able to > justify the investment of time into such package development and support, > the developers usually associated them with a scientific article. The > number of citations of those articles are considered as measures of the > usefulness of articles and are required to justify the time spent on them. > > Unfortunately, as of now, a significant issue is that such packages are > not cited despite being extensively used. Part of this is due to the > difficulties with compiling the list of proper citations for each module > (and, for libraries associated with multiple update publications, selecting > the relevant citation). Part of this is due to users not realizing which of > the modules they are using have associated publications and should be cited. > > To remediate to that situation, I suggest a __citation__ method associated > to each package installation and import. Called from the __main__, > __citation__() would scan __citation__ of all imported packages and return > the list of all relevant top-level citations associated to the packages. > > As a scientific package developer working in academia, the problem is > quite serious, and the solution seems relatively straightforward. > > What does Python core team think about addition and long-term maintenance > of such a feature to the import and setup mechanisms? What do other users > and scientific package developers think of such a mechanism for citations > retrieval? > > Best, > > > *Andrei Kucharavy*Post-Doc @ *Joel S. Bader* > * Lab*Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. > > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list > Python-ideas@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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