On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Andrei Kucharavy <andrei.kuchar...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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?
This is indeed a serious problem. I suspect python-ideas isn't the best venue for addressing it though – there's nothing here that needs changes to the Python interpreter itself (I think), and the people who understand this problem the best and who are most affected by it, mostly aren't here. You'll want to check out the duecredit project: https://github.com/duecredit/duecredit One of the things they've thought about is the ability to track citation information at a more fine-grained way than per-package – for example, there might be a paper that should be cited by anyone who calls a particular method (or even passes a specific argument to some specific method, when that turns on some fancy algorithm). The R world also has some prior art -- in particular I know they have citations as part of the standard metadata in every package. I'd actually like to see a more general solution that isn't restricted to any one language, because multi-language analysis pipelines are very common. For example, we could standardize a convention where if a certain environment variable is set, then the software writes out citation information to a certain location, and then implement libraries that do this in multiple languages. Of course, that's a "dynamic" solution that requires running the software -- which is probably necessary if you want to do fine-grained citations, but it might be useful to also have static metadata, e.g. as part of the package metadata that goes into sdists, wheels, and on PyPI. That would be a discussion for the distutils-sig mailing list, which manages that metadata. One challenge in standardizing this kind of thing is choosing a standard way to represent citation information. Maybe CSL-JSON? There's a lot of complexity as you dig into this, though of course one shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good... -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
