Attributing and Referencing (Research) Software: Best Practices and Outlook From Inria

Software is a fundamental pillar of modern scientific research, across all fields and disciplines. However, there is a lack of adequate means to cite and reference software due to the complexity of the problem in terms of authorship, roles, and credits. This complexity is further increased when it is considered over the lifetime of a software that can span up to several decades. Building upon the internal experience of Inria, the French research institute for digital sciences, we provide in this article a contribution to the ongoing efforts in order to develop proper guidelines and recommendations for software citation and reference. Namely, we recommend: first, a richer taxonomy for software contributions with a qualitative scale; second, to put humans at the heart of the evaluation; and third, to distinguish citation from reference.