Updates to Software Citation in NASA ADS and Zenodo

10 January 2019

The AAS Asclepias Project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, announces the release of updates to the NASA ADS bibliographic index and the Zenodo repository related to the citation of scientific software in the literature. The NASA ADS now extracts and indexes cited software repositories published with the DataCite registry, making them discoverable through its platform and resulting in new metrics for software use and reuse in astronomical research. Zenodo, using citation brokering software built for the Asclepias project, receives software citations from ADS and other sources, and displays them on the repository’s software records. These infrastructure updates provide important new tools for authors of research papers and developers of scientific software. Authors can now find software records in the ADS that have been cited in the scientific literature, which can directly be incorporated into their manuscripts using the ADS tools that astronomers rely upon. Developers who preserve their software by creating persistent citable entries, e.g. in Zenodo, can discover their software’s reuse metrics right on their Zenodo repository’s landing page. Astronomers, who often work around across such divisions, can use ADS to track all of their publication and software research outputs.

ADS and Zenodo rely upon a combination of full-text content from Publishers as well as metadata from the DataCite and CrossRef registries to provide these services. High fidelity indexing and tracking of software objects in the literature is thus dependent on careful, intentional work by developers, authors, and publishers when archiving and citing these digital objects. With these enhancements, both ADS and Zenodo now provide citation minting and tracking capabilities which comply with the recommendations of the Force11 citation implementation working group.

For more information from Zenodo please see release about this update (http://blog.zenodo.org/2019/01/10/2019-01-10-asclepias/) and their FAQ on citation information (http://help.zenodo.org/#citations).