Disclaimer: This adheres mostly to GitHub projects for scientific / research software, but may be of interest to others as well.

In scientific and research communities, the **citation of research software** (i.e., software that’s used in and for research) is an issue that needs to be resolved, as citations are still the common currency for academic credit and acknowledgment.

Last year, the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group has published a paper on Software Citation Principles, a community effort outlining what the main issues with software citation are, and what best practices can be applied.

The successor of that working group, the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group (also here on GitHub) is currently working on, you will have guessed, implementations for software citation, including the Citation File Format and CodeMeta.

I’d like to start a conversation of whether and how software citation metadata (provided in either or both of the above formats) could be re-used by the GitHub platform. I’m thinking along the lines of introducing a Cite “tab” - similar to the License “tab” on the project site to display a formatted version of the citation metadata by users, e.g., in BibTeX, Endnote, Reference Manager (RIS) formats, and in a plain-text version for copying and pasting (e.g., based on the Citation Style Language).

Disclaimer 2: I’m a member of the FORCE11 SCIWG, the main developer of the Citation File Format, and a contributor of CodeMeta.