#236 Citation form

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

Hi there,

I'm a researcher. I used your wonderful piece of software and I want to cite it as part of the data collection procedure. However, I couldn't find any citation form anywhere. I wanted to ask if you have some specific citation form for the software and, if not, if you could create one. I would rather not make it up myself :)

Thank you very much

[Martin Guy]

What's a citation form? Can you give an example so that we can try to fill it in appropriately?

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

Hi!

Basically it's how to reference it properly (specially in academic contexts), so that among others fair credit is attributed, and others can easily find it.

For example, this is the what the ELAN project says:

https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan/cite

or Stan:

https://mc-stan.org/users/citations/

or R language:

## 
## To cite R in publications use:
## 
##   R Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical
##   computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
##   URL https://www.R-project.org/.
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Manual{,
##     title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
##     author = {{R Core Team}},
##     organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
##     address = {Vienna, Austria},
##     year = {2021},
##     url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
##   }
## 
## We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it
## when using it for data analysis. See also 'citation("pkgname")' for
## citing R packages.

## citing R packages.

[Martin Guy]

Thanks. I need to seek advice about what to put to credit it properly (as there are rather a lot of SoX developers!)

Where would be a good place to put it so that anyone else who wants to know this will see it?
In a file called "CITATION" in the top directory of the source tree? In the README?

[Martin Guy]

I'm also not sox.sf.net personally but will do it here
https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/issues/266
from where it will probably migrate to sox..sf.net at some point.

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

Hi!!! Thank you so much :)

I would say that the beginning of the README would be great a place to put it. I would say that's the most accessible place to put it

[Martin Guy]

Thanks. We're almost there:

To cite SoX in publications please use:

Lance Norskog, Chris Bagwell et al. (2015).
SoX: Sound eXchange. the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation.
URL http://sox.sourceforge.net

A BibTeX entry for SoX users is

@manual{SoX2015,
title = "SoX: Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation",
author = "Norskog, Lance and Bagwell, Chris et al.",
edition = "14.4.2",
year = 2015,
url = "http://sox.sourceforge.net",
}

We have just one query:

The main author usually says in his copyright messages:

"Chris Bagwell and Sundry Contributors"

or

"Chris Bagwell and SoX Contributors"

and we'd like to point out that a lot of people have made SoX what it is
but I guess it would be academically more correct to say
"et al." but this will probably make BibTeX parsers think that
one of the authors is called "Bagwell, Chris et al." and index it wrongly,
while "Norskog, Lance and Bagwell, Chris and et al." just looks odd.

Do you know whether there is a convention for saying "et al." in BibTeX entries,
whether "and et al." is OK, or whether "and Sox (or Sundry) Contributors"
would be acceptable or should we just use the two names in the BibTeX entry?

We've decided to put it at the end of the manual page in a CITATION section as that is the document that is being cited and the head of the README seems a bit too prominent (not everyone writes papers!)

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

That looks great, thanks!!!

Indeed, the parser gets "et al." as part of the name. I don't think there's a standard way to adress this issue. A common practice is to name it as "R development team". In this case, since there appear to be two clear developers and contributors, I don't think anyone is ever going to complain with (this is how I edited it for myself):

@manual{SoX2015,
title = "SoX: Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation",
author = "Norskog, Lance and Bagwell, Chris and Sox (Sundry) Contributors",
edition = "14.4.2",
year = 2015,
url = "http://sox.sourceforge.net",
}

The location of the reference sounds great to me :)

Thank you so, so much

[Martin Guy]

OK, the final version is:

To cite SoX in publications use:

Lance Norskog, Chris Bagwell et al. (2015).
SoX: Sound eXchange. the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation.
URL http://sox.sourceforge.net

A BibTeX entry for SoX users is

@manual{SoX2015,
title = "SoX: Sound eXchange, the Swiss Army knife of audio manipulation",
author = "Norskog, Lance and Bagwell, Chris and others",
edition = "14.4.2",
year = 2015,
url = "http://sox.sourceforge.net",
}

[Reuben Thomas]

The standard way to have an explicit "et al" in BibTeX is to use the pseudo-author "others", which is documented as point 5 on p. 12 of the BibTeX manual.

[Martin Guy]

Inigo, I tried to mail you privately to check that your software handles "and others" correctly, but mail to iurrestarazupor@users.sourceforge.net bounces saying "550 unknown user" so this is the only communication channel we have :-/

Can you check that "Bagwell and others" works correctly for you?

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

Hi Martin,

Sorry I could not come to this before. I could not find the bibtex manual you mention, but I think I would prefer to keep it as Sox contributors, since it´s clearer about the role these "others" play.

Alia and others should be just synonyms, and I bet some people are going to complain is they read "others"/"alia". We use "alia"/"other" to abbreviate, but all of them should be mentioned somewhere in the paper, and people are going to say "this is wrong, because these alia don't exist anywhere" (academia is a very funny place, with picky people being picky about stuff that does not matter that much). I don't think anyone would complain about 'Sox contributors', because it's clearer (at least to me) that Bagwell is the main developer or the person who started the project, but had assistance of a group of contributors.

In any case, one way or the other, we can already start citing it :)

[Martin Guy]

The BibTeX manual says:

If you have too many names to list in an author or editor field,
you can end the list with “and others”;
the standard styles appropriately append an “et al.”

so "and others" it is for BibTeX , Thank you for your precision

[Inigo Urrestarazu Porta]

Oh, I see!!! That's nice :)

Either way, others or Sox contributors is fine. We can properly cite it now.

Thank you so much