Announcing biblatex-software

Abstract

Software, and software source code in particular, is widely used in modern research. It must be properly archived, referenced, described and cited in order to build a stable and long lasting corpus of scienti c knowledge. And yet, up to now there was no speci c support for citing software in the popular BibTeX format that we use for our bibliographies. We got used to work around this lack of dedicated support by tweaking the @misc entry, citing the user manual, or an article related to a software artifact, or adding in the text or in a footnote urls pointing to a place where one could get the software: the project web page, or a code hosting platform. These workaround were a manifestation of the fact that software artifacts themselves were not considered rst class citizen in the scholarly world. With the recent raise of interest on reproducibility of research re- sults, from Artifact Evaluation Committees to the ACM Badges, we have started moving towards giving nally software the aca- demic dignity it deserves.