The Citation File Format: Providing citation metadata for research software

Abstract

The Citation File Format (CFF) lets researchers and RSEs provide correct and complete citation metadata for the software they develop and maintain. The format is supported in different ways by tools and platforms such as GitHub, Zenodo, reference managers and IDEs. Currently, there are over 16,000 CITATION.cff files on GitHub alone, and the generated recommended citation information has been viewed over 1.2 million times. This talk provides an overview of the format itself, the tools that are available to work with CFF, and its above-mentioned integrations. It also gives an insight of the CFF project as an open project, the implementation of governance and funding. And finally, it presents a first look at how the format is used in real life, based on the analysis of a corpus of over 12,000 CFF files: what are the challenges, what works well, what should change.