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. 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. If you don't have documentation, then cite the URL of the project. Or perhaps your repository is the preferred point of reference? If you don't have a good URL, then it's probably going to be difficult to cite the project. 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. Spending 2 cents one email at a time, Matt _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
