Software Citation with Fine Granularity: The g.citation Module for GRASS GIS

GRASS GIS (grass.osgeo.org) is a community-driven geospatial software project with a record of being used in scientific publications and research projects over three decades. Authors of scientific publications, when using and citing GRASS GIS, so far opted for citing either the entire software package, citing the most recent review publication associated with GRASS GIS, or citing a publication associated with a specific module.

GRASS GIS provides over 500 modules, each with a unique functionality and purpose, many with associated scientific publications. In addition to these core modules in the GRASS GIS distribution there is a growing number of additional add-on modules are being developed, often as part of research work. Until now, no automated, software-enabled citation mechanism to cite individual GRASS GIS modules, or functions in general was provided due to the lack of a reference citation standard for GRASS GIS modules defined within the GRASS GIS community.

We present a new GRASS GIS module g.citation with the aim to provide a convenient, concise, and standardized way of citing GRASS GIS and its individual modules. The current version of g.citation extracts the relevant information from a respective manual page of any given GRASS GIS module and turns this semi-structured record into a proper citation in a variety of styles and formats with the machine-readable Citation File Format (CFF) currently promising most efficiency and expressiveness in storing the information and Citation Style Language (CSL) used for formatting citations. The module is now in a prototype stage and it is available in the GRASS GIS Addons repository. Future directions include using standardized format for storing the citation information together with the code and incorporating persistent scientific identifiers such as DOI. We are now seeking collaborators and feedback from authors of geospatial algorithms who want to share their code and be cited at the same time.