How to reference software that has a CFF file?

[ZedThree]

Presumably we could grab most of the needed info out of the reference's CFF file, but should there be a better way? And what should be the minimal info for citing a project with a CFF file?

[sdruskat]

Perhaps add an optional "cff" key to be able to harvest info from CFF files? Possibly support other formats as well?

[jspaaks]

Having the same schema for 'this' creative work and referenced creative works would potentially simplify this because then document1.references[0] could be exactly equal to document2 (possibly even including document2's references, if you like recursion craziness).

refs https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/issues/70

Regarding minimal required info under that scenario, I think a doi might even be enough (although that does affect the readability by humans). We could have the CFF tooling resolve the doi and replace it with text it got from the CITATION.cff that is being referenced.

[jspaaks]

Related:

• https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/issues/414

[kevinmatthes]

With Aeruginous v3.5.0, there are two ways of generating a reference entry for the own CITATION.cff automatically:

• cffreference the source CITATION.cff (see #414), or
• cff-create a CITATION.cff from the source project's manifest and directly pipe it into cffreference; see example in #500.

If the manifest format of the source project should not be supported by Aeruginous, yet, please do not hesitate to create an issue about the missing manifest format.