Feedback on the citations section

[BaumiCoder]

I am using scc in a research project. Thanks for the great tool!

For the citations I took a look at the current citation section of the README. As this section is not that old (added with 54b5f82), I want to give some feed back on it to may help future researchers.

General

First, some general points:

Please use the following bibtex entry to cite scc in a publication:

It says that this is for bibtex, but there is no entry type software for BibTeX (see here or here). This type is only available in the more modern BibLaTeX.

Furthermore, the bib snippet is not in a normal Markdown code block, which do code highlighting and give a copy button on GitHub. Instead, an HTML <pre> is in use. Is that intended? Here in a Markdown code block (type bib):

@software{scc,
  author       = {Ben Boyter},
  title        = {scc: v3.5.0},
  month        = ...,
  year         = ...,
  publisher    = {...},
  version      = {v3.5.0},
  doi          = {...},
  url          = {...}
}

Fields

I also want to give feedback of the listed fields. This is the entry, I am using:

@Software{scc,
 author     = {Ben Boyter and {Contributers}},
 title      = {scc},
 version    = {v3.6.0},
 year       = {2025},
 month      = {10},
 repository = {https://github.com/boyter/scc},
}

Depending on the citations style and settings, this may look differently in the document. In my case it looks that way:

• author: If a Open-Source software have a community in addition to the core team (maintainer and core contributers), I tend to add "Contributes" highlight this aspect. However, I think this is a matter of taste.
• title: Including version here lead to a duplication, with the version field, at least with the style and settings of my document.
• version: The README has a hardcoded version of v3.5.0. Should that be updated on releases? Otherwise, I would suggest taking a placeholder vx.y.z and explain it below the bib snippet.
• publisher: For literature, such as books or research papers, this is the publishing organization, such as ACM, IEEE or Elsevier. In the case of software, it could be the organization that publishes the software if it is not the same as the development organization (e.g., Company A develops some proprietary software and its sub company B sells the usage licenses). In case of scc I think there is no publisher in that sense. Therefore, the field should be removed.
• doi: That is for a Digital Object Identifier which is a unique identifier. Most research papers have one. However, if scc have no DOI the field should be removed. It is possible to get a DOI for source code (specific for a version) for example at zenodo. Mostly, this is in use for code artifacts related to research papers. Things that are normally released only once with the paper and no maintenance. However, there are also examples with several versions. Here one DOI of a random pick from zenodo: 10.5281/zenodo.20645312
• url / repository: I prefer using the repository field. However, If there is not a website and a repository for a project, it is maybe only a matter of taste.

[boyter]

Sounds reasonable to me. I can look to update it based on what you say.

@Software{scc,
 author     = {Ben Boyter and {Contributors}},
 title      = {scc},
 version    = {vx.y.z},
 year       = {...},
 month      = {...},
 repository = {https://github.com/boyter/scc},
}

If I replace it with the above, and change it to say BibLaTeX would that work for you?

[BaumiCoder]

Yes, that looks good to me.

[boyter]

Done.