Citation information: Add DOI for code base citation

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1

Hello everybody,

this is a proposal to augment the best practices for GMT citation.

The GMT website currently states that the best practice to cite GMT is by reference to articles and technical papers ( Citing — The Generic Mapping Tools ). However, the GMT codebase can also be directly cited by a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which works both for the overall/latest codebase (e.g. 10.5281/zenodo.3407865) or a specific code release (e.g. version 6.0.0. 10.5281/zenodo.3407866). DOI-based code citations have become best practice among various journals, including AGU journals, where GMT is already cited by its code DOI. Stats for the last years here: TheGenericMappingToolsversion6.6.0 DOI-based References Could the citation information on the website please be extended to also mention code DOI ? Maybe similar as QGIS handles this: FAQ · QGIS Web Site (“How to cite QGIS”) ? Best, Peter

2

Apparently it’s much better for the authors of GMT papers to get the papers always cited, regardless of the specific release Zenodo DOI citation.

3

Hi @ploewe,

Thanks for reaching out and mentioning this.

I agree that citing a specific version can be very helpful in the context of reproducibility of analysis and visualizations.

I submitted a PR for this at POC: Citing GMT: Add single releases with their zenodo DOIs by yvonnefroehlich · Pull Request #163 · GenericMappingTools/website · GitHub. So far only the entry for GMT 6.6.0 has been added. I will wait for ideas and feedback from the team before adding the older versions. Feel free to make suggestions.

4

I think Zenodo accepts versions within the same repository, with a DOI per version plus a special permanent DOI always pointing to the latest version.

I’m not sure how exactly “the latest” is understood by the Zenodo system, e.g., whether it’s possible to add earlier gmt releases after the 6.6.0 has been added and still have 6.6.0 as the latest.

5

Actually, the number of citations of the GMT 6 paper is at the moment already close to 3000 (please see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335646429_The_Generic_Mapping_Tools_Version_6). As it is very unlikely that any of the involved authors will publish 3000 or more papers with at least 3000 citations each, any additional citation of the GMT 6 paper will not increase the h-index of these authors :sweat_smile:.

6

I imagine the authors apply for funds for gmt development and infrastructure support

I imagine it would always be helpful to have a steadily growing citation figures in this context - thousands, tens of thousands, more. That highlights the importance of the project for the scientific community.

7

Hello @yvonnefroehlich ,

thanks for submitting the PR for the version DOI of GMT 6.6.0 ! Instead of adding many version DOI for older GMT releases, a reference to the list of all existing version DOI on the Zenodo landing page could be linked: Search results The QGIS project uses this approach, too.