Delete 4 and 1

[ChrisJefferson]

Deciding on if I should cite something should not depend on if they want a citation. Citations shouldn't be viewed as "bonuses" to give out to your friends / co-workers in my opinion.

[mr-c]

Hello @ChrisJefferson , thanks for responding.

We stand strongly with the idea that if you use a piece of software in your research and the software/the authors request citation then you should cite it.

Did our wording suggestion something different to you?

#4 also attracted questions on Twitter https://twitter.com/ctitusbrown/status/712585852178837505

We're looking to see how to clarify our intent there

[ChrisJefferson]

My equivalent here would be, some person in my field wants me to cite their paper.

Either I should be citing their paper because it contains relevant work, or it isn't relevant so I shouldn't cite it. Their wish of if I should, or shouldn't cite it should be irrelvant to the process.

Similarly, if software A and software B were equally relevant to my project, I would consider it scientific bad behaviour to cite A because they want it, but not cite B because they don't really care. Either they both need citing, or neither.

[mr-c]

@ChrisJefferson We are in agreement with you. The decision tree is to help authors get to a firm "yes" or "no" answer as quickly as possible.

[turingfan]

I completely agree with Chris and disagree completely with the workflow.

The authors' wish to be cited or not or benefit from being cited or not should be irrelevant EXCEPT in a very small number of cases. Roughly speaking those cases would be "Is it a coin toss situation whether to cite or not." In no situation should you cite somebody just because the author would like you to, and in no situation should you cite something just because it would help the authors out financially or otherwise.

Note that nothing in the preceding paragraph is to do with software. It's to do with any scientific contribution. Software should not be elevated to a special case.

[ChrisJefferson]

@mr-c : If you are in agreement with me, then I don't see how you could defend points 4 and 1, in particular point 1 being first.

Perhaps point 1 could be changed to "Does the software require you to cite it"? (if that is the case it is meant to cover, including for example gnu-parallel).

In that case one must either cite it, or stop using it (in the case of gnu parallel, I plan to stop using it, and recommend others stop using it).

[danielskatz]

I agree with the point of this issue.

[katrinleinweber]

I think the contention here comes from the fact that the If you don't know block in 1. mostly answers the "How do I cite" question, after already deciding to do so. Maybe the order 2., 3., 1. would be best, plus either dropping 4. or merging into 1. and rephrasing the If you don't know block into How to find the citation metadata.

Would such a PR be welcome?

[mr-c]

@ChrisJefferson This is not about citing any piece of "related" software, but software you actually used in the conduct of ones research. If you used it, then it must have been relevant. If you disagree, then maybe switch to another provider of software that isn't requesting a citation.

To make this clear I've created the following pull request: #19 Thank you @ChrisJefferson @turingfan @danielskatz @katrinleinweber for the discussion, it was helpful!

[ChrisJefferson]

I mean, you are welcome to close the issue if you like, but this is still totally against my (personal) opinion, which is that Q1 and Q4 should simply be removed.

[danielskatz]

I feel like this issue was closed before the discussion was over.

In my opinion, the solution that would be best is:

1. drop the part about academic credit - the affiliations of software authors should have no impact on if their software is cited or not.
2. Clarify the question about what should be cited. I don't think that you can provide a single answer to this. The best we did in the SCWG was

What software should be cited is the decision of the author(s) of the research work in the context of community norms and practices, and in most research communities, these are currently in flux. In general, we believe that software should be cited on the same basis as any other research product such as a paper or book; that is, authors should cite the appropriate set of software products just as they cite the appropriate set of papers, perhaps following the FORCE11 Data Citation Working Group principles, which state, “In scholarly literature, whenever and wherever a claim relies upon data, the corresponding data should be cited” (Data Citation Synthesis Group, 2014).

which I've sometimes simplified as: Cite the software that is important to the work. If using different software would lead to different results, cite the software.