Re: [OT] tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 23:55 +0200, Bernhard R. Link wrote: * Michael Banck [EMAIL PROTECTED] [081007 22:53]: Also, having this would sense a clear signal to upstream authors that we consider proper citing important and that enforcing citations in copyright licensing is not the best thing to do. I think the better signal to send is that enforced citation is considered not academical behaviour as it is simply citation trolling. I my eyes it is equivalent of paying people to cite you. (Or rather eqauivalent to harrassing people to make them cite you). I disagree. Papers are required to provide full details on the methods they use which affect the results, whether an instrument or piece of software. That provides transparency and verification. For example, if someone package A version B.C to solve equation Y, and someone else gets a different solution, and a third person later finds a bug in that version, it is essential to have the software and version in the papers in order to sort out who is write. The citation provides the canonical reference to the software. To address another side of this, the relevant currency in academia is credit and not money, and nobody is paying or harassing anyone to use a piece of software. If you don't want to cite it, use a different tool, or re-implement it. But using software without citing it is like not citing an algorithm or experimental method. There might be things where software can actually be used as academical contribution to some paper, but all examples I've yet seen were just ridicilously broad. Neighter your calculator nor your typewriter belonged in the citations (though sometimes might have been added as kind of joke, like people trying to award PHDs to their desktop computer), not does the equivalent in software. Citations have an academic purpose, they are not something to collect to make your resume look better... That's a completely different situation. One doesn't need to cite the make and model of computer, as long as computers can be trusted to do math properly -- the Pentium fdiv bug being the only counterexample I know of in the past 30 years or so. Until scientific software is as reliable and robust as arithmetic in silicon (or the libm for that matter), we'll need to cite it properly. -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
* Michael Banck [EMAIL PROTECTED] [081008 00:28]: Certainly, the citation mannors might be different in the various fields of science, but at least in some fields, if you use a software package to create scientific data you publish, The important part here is what means use a software package to create scientific data you publish? In broad terms that would include the kernel you use (you can hardly produce data without), your editor, the compiler you used to compile your programs into binaries, the xcalc you used to check the numbers sum up, and so on. I do not see why that should be different for example for the typesetting package or the computer algrebra system you use to do some matrix inversions. Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
* Charles Plessy [EMAIL PROTECTED] [081008 16:28]: [...], but when authors ask to be cited, it is not for vanity but for professional survival. Sorry if that sounds harsh: But when people fake their results, they sometimes do not do so for vanity but for survival, too. Luckily, whith the advent of electronic publication, there are less limits on the number of references per article. So making citations less meaningfull by just adding everything or even trying to pressure people into making unmeaningfull citations is less bad? In the end, if people really prefer to work with this or that kernel, I would not be shocked if it were mentinned somewhere in the article, similarly to rock bands that indicate what gutar strings they use :) Nothing bad about mentioning things that might make some reading less boring, but additional thanks and mentioning of things not needed for the verfication or scientific surroundings of an paper is really only up to the author. Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Debichem-devel] Chemistry wiki page
On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 05:05:51PM +0200, Michael Banck wrote: On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 12:10:14AM +0100, Chris Walker wrote: I have added almost all[1] the science-chemistry packages to the http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Chemistry page. I have done some categorisation of them, but mainly from their descriptions - so corrections welcome. Thanks, I've now extended it a bit and shuffled things around. Excellent - just what I hoped would happen. I have also included the abinitio package abinit and OpenMX - from the physics task, and the v-sim structure viewer (again from the physics task). Should these be added to the science-chemistry task? v-sim probably (I think we had a discussion about it). I have taken the liberty of adding this to the chemistry task. I'm not really a chemist, so if there are objections, please feel free to remove it. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
Le Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 08:19:25AM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit : Regarding your first item we might think about a debian/references file with a defined structure and write a dh_installreferences script to move this information to a defined place. I would strongly vote for RFC822 format (as debian/control, Packages and Sources file). There are tools inside Debian to work on this format (I'm using these in my scripts) and conversion to any other format like BibTeX would be easy. Le Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 11:24:10AM +0200, Teemu Ikonen a écrit : How about adding an extra field to the machine readable copyright file format? The mr-copyright file is RFC822 and thus easy to parse, and is already in every Debian package. Package users could find the citation from the same place as other author, copyright and licensing info. As could the program generating task pages and other package listings. Hi all, I have no strong opinion where to put the bibliographic information, and propose to discuss the different possibilities on debian-devel once we have brainstormed enough. For the format, although I won't stop volunteers to write conversion scripts, I would like to stress out that for biology the easiest is probably do download the pubmed.org record and convert it using the bibutils package in Debian, and that if we do not use a well recognised format, the first thing users will do is probably to reconvert what we provide to either PubMed, BibTeX or Endnote formats... When we will have enough references, having a debhelper script will definitely be a nice enhancement. I also see it as a long term goal, as it will take one release cycle to have it in Stable. Using it before can complicate user backports. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
