[Python-Dev] Official citation for Python (original) (raw)

Wes Turner wes.turner at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 00:05:43 EDT 2018

On Sunday, September 9, 2018, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:

On 9/9/2018 3:43 PM, Jacqueline Kazil wrote:

<http:///>The PSF has received a few inquiries asking the question — “How do I cite Python?”So, I am reaching out to you all to figure this out.

(For those that don’t know my background, I have been in academia for a bit as a Ph.D student and have worked at the Library of Congress writing code to process Marc records <https://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/>, among other things.) IMHO the citation for Python should be decided upon by the Python developers and should live somewhere on the site. Two questions to be answered… 1. What format should it take? There are by now formats for citing web documents. I presume style guides now include such. Try a current version of the Chicago Manual of Style. (not sure of exact title). I will ask a university professor who should know more than I.

Citation Style Language -- supported by a number of citation tools such as Zotero and Mendeley -- is used to generate citations in very many citation styles such as Chicago, MLA, https://citationstyles.org https://citationstyles.org/authors/ https://www.zotero.org/styles (9141 styles, really) https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles

BibTeX can be generated with CSL.

SciPy, scikit-learn, statsmodels, and pandas all list bibtex citations in their docs.

https://www.scipy.org/citing.html

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/about.html#citing-scikit-learn https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/#citation https://pandas.pydata.org/talks.html

BibTeX is rather unspecified; in terms of which fields/attributes to define.

Search engines index schema.org metadata; which can be represented as RDF in HTML (RDFa), microdata, JSON-LD:

https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/Code https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle

Ideally, a tool such as Zotero or Mendeley can auto-detect and parse the citation for reformatting (with CSL) into whichever citation style is used for a bibliography / works cited / tools section.

Are there separate citations for Python and CPython?

https://westurner.github.io/tools/#cpython

https://sphinxcontrib-bibtex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

This extension allows BibTeX citations to be inserted into documentation generated by Sphinx, via a bibliography directive, and a cite role, which work similarly to LaTeX’s thebibliography environment and \cite command.

2. Where does it live on the site?

On https://bugs.python.org/issue26597, I suggested the Copyright page. I now think a link to 'Citing these Documents' on https://docs.python.org/3/ would be even better.

A heading in the docs would be great. People may also be likely to read the README.

If there are potentially multiple citations, sphinxcontrib-bibtex may be worth adding to the CPython docs.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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