How to reference the proj.4 library

[DamienIrving]

I'm writing a scientific journal paper at the moment in which I use Iris to re-calculate atmospheric wind data in a rotated coordinate system (i.e. one where the north pole has been moved). In the methods section of the paper I list the major software packages I used for the research, including any references to academic papers written about that software (e.g. many authors of scientific software are publishing with journals like the Journal of Open Research Software so they can get academic credit for their work). Since Iris uses proj.4 for grid rotation, I'd like to reference proj.4 if possible. Is there an appropriate reference that I could cite?

[rouault]

For a next time, github ticket are not the best place for questions. The medium for that is rather the proj mailing list : http://lists.maptools.org/mailman/listinfo/proj
Speaking just on my behalf, I don't think there's a recommandation to reference proj.4. "The Proj.4 library : https://github.com/OSGeo/proj.4" would be fine I think. If you want to reference a particular algorithm in proj, then you'd have to dig up in the history to find the original author(s), but I don't think they care that much. Oh well, I'm just not in acadamics and don't pretend to understand the subtelties of that aspect of the academic work ;-) The only obligations related to proj.4 are the ones linked to the software license : https://github.com/OSGeo/proj.4/blob/master/COPYING. Much of the original work was done by Gerald Evenden, probably largely based on Snyder's works, but there have been a lot of other contributions.

[hobu]

"The Proj.4 library : https://github.com/OSGeo/proj.4" would be fine I think.

Yep. Maybe specifically call out Gerald too, but since proj.4 is a fork of Gerald's work, maybe this would be confusing.

[katrinleinweber]

Have you considered applying GH's "Citable Code" guide and/or including a CITATION file in this repo?