citing a package?
Thank you to all the contributors to my original post. It has been informative to me, and appears to have provoked a small but important discussion about how we perform our duties in our various capacities as creators, developers and users. I like Thomas' suggestion,
eg, Lumley T (2003) Rmeta version 2.10. R package. http://cran.r-project.org
in addition to citing papers or books that discuss details of use, e.g., citing Venalbles and Ripley (2002) Modern Applied Statistics with S, for the MASS package. Thanks again, Hank Stevens
On Feb 9, 2004, at 11:08 AM, Thomas Lumley wrote:
On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:
Dear Martin, I'd suggest you check the "DESCRIPTION" file and ask the author(s) of the package (e.g., a package might be related to a tech report which might, now, be in press, or whatever).
The posted suggestions seem to be that you don't cite the package, you cite something else vaguely related to it instead. This violates both the purpose of a citation (a link to the original source) and the principle (which I hope R users support) that software is publishable in itself, not just as an appendage to text. Most citation styles give rules for citing software and rules for citing URIs. Even when the package author has been completely unhelpful in constructing a package title you can still put together a perfectly reasonable citation, eg, Lumley T (2003) Rmeta version 2.10. R package. http://cran.r-project.org Some publishers might want a download date, or an explicit statement that it is software (eg to make searching easier). -thomas
Dr. Martin Henry H. Stevens, Assistant Professor 338 Pearson Hall Botany Department Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 Office: (513) 529-4206 Lab: (513) 529-4262 FAX: (513) 529-4243 http://www.cas.muohio.edu/botany/bot/henry.html http://www.muohio.edu/ecology/ http://www.muohio.edu/botany/