How to cite Skan

[ns-rse]

I was curious if there is a method of citing Skan?

Some thoughts on things that can be done to make it easier to cite Skan are...

• Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) this can be achieved via Zenodo which intergrates with GitHub.
• Inlcude a Citation File Format (CFF) file in the repository.
• Publish a short technical article in The Journal of Open Source Software.

Making it easier to cite the software would help in quantifying how widely used it is (in the research community at least!).

[jni]

A good question @ns-rse! There is actually a page in the docs asking to cite the original paper that skan was written for. However, that is of course unfair to the contributors that have come since. This is something I have thought about a lot (similarly for scikit-image, for example). With skan, my plan (with no timeline) was to finish a bunch of API tweaks, like the round-tripping to networkx that we're working on, then publish a JOSS paper that includes all the contributors thus far. Depending on how long we think that would take, we can either make a Zenodo archive in the meantime, or just push through for JOSS.

[ns-rse]

🤦 Sorry missed that link scanning the top-level Miscellaneous section, thanks for the pointer.

Happy to help with JOSS paper when the time arises, but makes sense to get all the API tweaks sorted first.