Software Citations and the ACAT Community

Software is essential for the bulk of research today. It appears in the research cycle as infrastructure (both inputs and outputs, software obtained from others before the research is performed and software provided to others after the research is complete), as well as being part of the research itself (e.g., new software development). To measure and give credit for software contributions, the simplest path appears to be to overload the current paper citation system so that it also can support citations of software. A multidisciplinary working group built a set of principles for software citation in late 2016. Now, in ACAT 2017 and its proceedings, we want to experimentally encourage those principles to be followed, both to provide credit to the software developers and maintainers in the ACAT community and to try out the process, potentially finding flaws and places where it needs to be improved.