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

Jeremy Hylton jeremy at alum.mit.edu
Mon Sep 17 00:05:30 EDT 2018

I wanted to start with an easy answer that is surely unsatisfying: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2015/01/how-to-cite-software-in-apa-style.html

APA style is pretty popular, and it says that standard software doesn't need to be specified. Standard software includes "Microsoft Word, Java, and Adobe Photoshop." So I'd say Python fits well in that category, and doesn't need to be cited.

I said you wouldn't be satisfied...

On Sat, Sep 15, 2018 at 11:02 AM Jacqueline Kazil <jackiekazil at gmail.com> wrote:

I just got caught up on the thread. This is a really great discussion. Thank you for all the contributions.

Before we get into the details, let's go back to the main use case we are trying to solve. *As a user, I am writing an academic paper and I need to cite Python. *

The goal here is ambiguous. Python means many things--a language described by the language specification, the source code of a particular implementation of the language (Python often refers to C Python), a particular binary release of the implementation of the language (Python 1.5.2 for Windows). Which one is relevant in the context of the paper? If you're talking about a bug in timsort in a particular version of C Python, then you probably want to cite that specific version of the implementation.

I suspect the most common goal for a citation is just to describe the language "in general" where 1.5.2 or 3.7.0 and Jython or CPython are all details that don't matter. In that case I'd cite the language specification. We're talking about putting a citation in a paper (a written source) and the written language specification captures what we think of as essential for the language. If you want to cite Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, you'd cite the paper where he wrote it down (in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society). If you want to cite a programming language in the abstract, cite the specification that describes it.

I think style guides are relevant here. They give guidance on how to cite an item based on its category. For example, the MLA style guide describes how to cite a digital file, a physical object, and many other things. My favorite example under "physical object" is "Physical objects found online." (Think about it :-).

There's some discussion of how to cite source code here: http://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/writing-code. Notably this is talking about citing source code in the context of other source code, and it mostly recommends using URLs. If you wanted to cite a particular piece of source code in an written article, you'd probably follow one of the approaches for citing online resources. Try to identify who / when / what / where. For example MLA style for a blog post would be : Editor, screen name, author, or compiler name (if available). “Posting Title.” Name of Site, Version number (if available), Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), URL. Date of access. You could cite a particular source file this way or a particular source release.

The date usually refers to the original publication date. I think that was with the 1.0 release, although I'm not sure. I'd probably pick that date, but someone can correct me if there's an earlier date. It would suggest somehow that current Python and the original Python were mostly the same thing, which is an idea I like.

van Rossum, Guido (1994). "The Python Language Reference". Python Software Foundation, https://docs.python.org/reference/index.html. Retrieved 16 September 2018.

I'd say that's all settled. If anyone asks you, "How can you be sure that settles it?" You can answer, "Some guy said it on a mailing list." And then you can site the message:

Jeremy Hylton. "[Python-Dev] Official citation for Python." Sep. 17, 2018. python-dev, https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev. Accessed 18 September 2018.

Jeremy

Let's throw reproducibility out the window for now (<--- something I never thought I would say), because that should be captured in the code, not in the citations.

So, if we don't need the specific version of Python, then maybe creating one citation is all we need. And that gives it some good Google juice as well. Thoughts? (Once we nail down one or many, I think we can then move into the details of the content of the citation.) -Jackie On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 12:47 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:

There was a thread about adding cite to things and a tool to collect those citations awhile back.

"[Python-ideas] Add a cite method for scientific packages" http://markmail.org/thread/rekmbmh64qxwcind Which CPython source file should contain this cite value? ... On a related note, you should ask the list admin to append a URL to each mailing list message whenever this list is upgraded to mm3; so that you can all be appropriately cited. On Thursday, September 13, 2018, Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:

Do you guys think we should all cite Grub and BusyBox and bash and libc and setuptools and pip and openssl and GNU/Linux and LXC and Docker; or else it's plagiarism for us all?

#OpenAccess On Wednesday, September 12, 2018, Stephen J. Turnbull <_ _turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

Chris Barker via Python-Dev writes:

> But "I wrote some code in Python to produce these statistics" -- > does that need a citation? That depends on what you mean by "statistics" and whether (as one should) one makes the code available. If the code is published or "available on request", definitely, Python should be cited. If not, and by "statistics" you mean the kind of things provided by Steven d'Aprano's excellent statistics module (mean, median, standard deviation, etc), maybe no citation is needed. But anything more esoteric than that (even linear regression), yeah, I would say you should cite both Python and any reference you used to learn the algorithm or formulas, in the context of mentioning that your statistics are home-brew, not produced by one of the recognized applications for doing so. > If so, maybe that would take a different form. Yes, it would. But not so different: eg, version is analogous to edition when citing a book. > Anyway, hard to make this decision without some idea how the > citation is intended to be used. Same as any other citation, (1) to give credit to those responsible for providing a resource (this is why publishers and their metadata of city are still conventionally included), and (2) to show where that resource can be obtained. AFAICS, both motivations are universally applicable in polite society. NB: Replication is an important reason for wanting to acquire the resource, but it's not the only one. I think underlying your comment is the question of what resource is being cited. I can think of three offhand that might be characterized as "Python". First, the PSF, as a provider of funding. There is a conventional form for this: a footnote on the title or author's name saying "The author acknowledges [a] grant [grant identifier if available] from the Python Software Foundation." I usually orally mention them in presentations, too. That one's easy; everybody should always do that. The rest of these, sort of an ideal to strive for. If you keep a bibliographic database, and there are now quite a few efforts to crowd source them, it's easier to go the whole 9 yards than to skimp. But except in cases where we don't need to even mention the code, probably we should be citing, for reasons of courtesy to readers as well as authors, editors, and publishers (as disgusting as many publishers are as members of society, they do play a role in providing many resources ---we should find ways to compete them into good behavior, not ostracize them). The second is the Python language and standard library. Then the Language Reference and/or the Library Reference should be cited briefly when Python is first mentioned, and in the text introducing a program or program fragment, with a full citation in the bibliography. I tentatively suggest that the metadata for the Language Reference would be Author: principal author(s) (Guido?) et al. OR python.org OR Python Contributors Title: The Python Language Reference Version: to match Python version used (if relevant, different versions each get full citations), probably should not be "current" Publisher: Python Software Foundation Date: of the relevant version Location: City of legal address of PSF URL: to version used (probably should not be the default) Date accessed: if "current" was used The Library reference would be the same except for Title. The third is a particular implementation. In that case the metadata would be Author: principal author(s) (Guido) et al. OR python.org OR Python Contributors Title: The cPython Python distribution Python Version: as appropriate (if relevant, different versions each get full citations), never "current" Distributor Version: if different from Python version (eg, additional Debian cruft) Publisher: Distributor (eg, PSF, Debian Project, Anaconda Inc.) Date: of the relevant version Location: City of legal address of distributor If downloaded: URL: to version used (including git commit SHA1 if available) Date accessed: download from distributor, not installation date If received on physical medium: use the "usual" form of citation for a collection of individual works (even if Python was the only thing on it). Probably the only additional information needed would be the distributor as editor of the collection and the name of the collection. In most cases I can think of, if the implementation is cited, the Language and Library References should be cited, too. Finally, if Python or components were modified for the project, the modified version should be preserved in a repository and a VCS identifier provided. This does not imply the repository need be publicly accessible, of course, although it might be for other reasons (eg, in a GSoC project,wherever or if hosted for free on GitHub). I doubt that "URNs" like DOI and ISBN are applicable, but if available they should be included in all cases as well. Steve

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