Software is as integral as a research paper, monograph, or dataset in terms of facilitating the full understanding and dissemination of research. This article provides broadly applicable guidance on software citation for the communities and institutions publishing academic journals and conference proceedings. We expect those communities and institutions to produce versions of this document with software examples and citation styles that are appropriate for their intended audience. This article (and those community-specific versions) are aimed at authors citing software, including software developed by the authors or by others. We also include brief instructions on how software can be made citable, directing readers to more comprehensive guidance published elsewhere. The guidance presented in this article helps to support proper attribution and credit, reproducibility, collaboration and reuse, and encourages building on the work of others to further research.

Software has been a crucial contributor to scientific progress in astronomy for decades, but practices that enable machine-actionable citations have not been consistently applied to software itself. Instead, software citation behaviors developed independently from standard publication mechanisms and policies, resulting in human-readable citations that remain hidden over time and that cannot represent the influence software has had in the field. These historical software citation behaviors need to be understood in order to improve software citation guidance and develop relevant publishing practices that fully support the astronomy community. To this end, a 23 year retrospective analysis of software citation practices in astronomy was developed. Astronomy publications were mined for 410 aliases associated with nine software packages and analyzed to identify past practices and trends that prevent software citations from benefiting software authors.

The library identified areas for service development and outreach to medical students and academic departments.

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Software is as integral as a research paper, monograph, or dataset in terms of facilitating the full understanding and dissemination of research. This article provides broadly applicable guidance on software citation for the communities and institutions publishing academic journals and conference proceedings. We expect those communities and institutions to produce versions of this document with software examples and citation styles that are appropriate for their intended audience. This article (and those community-specific versions) are aimed at authors citing software, including software developed by the authors or by others. We also include brief instructions on how software can be made citable, directing readers to more comprehensive guidance published elsewhere. The guidance presented in this article helps to support proper attribution and credit, reproducibility, collaboration and reuse, and encourages building on the work of others to further research.