The Software Citation Station

A website for making citing software used in your research quick and easy

Visit the software citation station • Submit a new citation • Read the paper

Why is it important to cite software?

Software is crucial for the advancement of astronomy and science especially in the context of rapidly growing datasets that increasingly require algorithm and pipeline development to process the data and produce results (Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2021). However, software has not always been consistently cited, despite its importance to strengthen support for software development (Howison & Bullard 2016; Niemeyer et al. 2016; Li et al. 2017; Bouquin et al. 2020; Alsudais 2021; Bouquin et al. 2023).

To encourage, streamline, and standardize the process of citing software in academic work such as publications and presentations we introduce The Software Citation Station: a publicly available website and tool to quickly find or add software citations. You can read our paper about the importance of software (citations), resources for software citation, and a description of our tool at this link.

This project uses TypeScript for backend utilities and JavaScript for the frontend.

npm install
npm run build
npm test

The project includes an automated system for caching Zenodo version information. See ZENODO_CACHE.md for details. Only data/zenodo-versions/scipy.json is tracked in the repository to keep history light; the fetch script/CI regenerate the full cache when run.

To manually update the cache:

npm run fetch-versions

The cache is automatically updated daily via GitHub Actions.