A new R package, cffr, has beendeveloped,peer-reviewed byrOpenSci and accepted by CRAN. Thispackage has a single purpose: to create a valid CITATION.cff file using themetadata of any R package. CITATION.cff files and why they matter A Citation File Format (CFF) is aplain text file with human- and machine-readable citation information forsoftware (and datasets) 1 . Under the hood, a CFF file is a YAML file.
I teach R to a lot of scientists, those that are new to science (i.e. students)as well as more established scientists, new to R.I find that after all their struggles of dealing with dates,or remembering where to put the comma, they’re so grateful to actual have an analysis,that they often forget or aren’t aware of the next steps.
Scientists rarely cite research software they use as part of a research project. As a consequence, the software and the time spent developing and maintaining it becomes an invisible scholarly contribution. Furthermore, this lack of visibility means that incentives to produce high quality, sustainable software are missing. Among many reasons why software is not cited, one is the lack of a clear citation information from package developers.
Our website is based on Markdown content rendered with Hugo.Markdown content is in some cases knit from R Markdown, but with less functionality than if one rendered R Markdown to html as in the blogdown default.In particular, we cannot use the usual BibTex + CSL + Pandoc-citeproc dance to handle a bibliography.Thankfully, using the rOpenSci package RefManageR, we can still make our own bibliography from a BibTeX file without formatting
citecorp is a new (hit CRAN in late August) R package for working with data from theOpenCitations Corpus (OCC).OpenCitations, run by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni,houses the OCC, an open repository of scholarly citation dataunder the very open CC0 license.
Citations are a crucial piece of scholarly work. They hold metadata on each scholarly work, including what people were involved, what year the work was published, where it was published, and more. The links between citations facilitate insight into many questions about scholarly work. Citations come in many different formats including BibTex, RIS, JATS, and many more.
