For example, in
http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
and recommended attribution?
I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html,
but that doesn't seem as complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed
journal.
Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?
I don't think you can "cite" a language. Maybe specific facts about
the language, drawn from the "literature" (e.g. www.python.org), but
not "the language" itself.
Or are you trying to refer to the _source_ of the language, as in
where it comes from?
-Peter
> > How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?
>
> I don't think you can "cite" a language. Maybe specific facts about
> the language, drawn from the "literature" (e.g. www.python.org), but
> not "the language" itself.
I can't speak for the OP, but I can imagine situations in which I'm
writing an academic paper, and want to use Python to describe an
algorithm or something, but don't trust my audience to all know Python.
So, I'd say that my algorithm was written in Python [1], where the
numbered reference points to somewhere people could go to learn what
Python is. Is there a canonical source of information or should one
just pick one of the intro to Python programming books?
--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epps...@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
http://www.python.org/doc/current/ref/ref.html
Or just point them to www.python.org and let the intelligent readers
figure out where to go from there.
-Peter
"to cite" in context of an academic publication means two things.
First, the acknowledgement must be in the form acceptable by the
publication. For example, the MLA has a long list of descriptions
of accepted ways to format different sources.
Second, and perhaps more importantly for academics, it means the
specific information source, if there is more than one. For example,
in one project I worked on we said
The authors request that any published work which utilizes VMD please
include the following reference:
Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual Molecular
Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38
In this way we could track which people published papers using our
work. (There are services which most research libraries provide
to do this type of citation searches.) We used this partially to
justify our funding.
Like it or not, many academic careers are affected by "impact factors"
which are a measure of importance of a paper, based partially on the
number of citations to the paper. A researcher would prefer seeing
N cites to one paper rather than N cites to M papers, because it suggests
that paper had a higher impact.
As to how to cite Python... I don't know. Most things I've seen
(I just did a search) just point to python.org . One paper I have
uses Mark Lutz's "Programming Python" book, but I wouldn't regard
that as the proper citation.
Andrew
da...@dalkescientific.com
I'm not sure that there's any fundamentally better "primary source" to
look to than <http://www.python.org/>.
There might be some early paper by Guido van Rossum on Python that
would be of some value; that would be more likely to be a "secondary"
source, though.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "ac.notelrac.teneerf@" "454aa"))
http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/sgml.html
"...as a robotics designer once told me, you don't really appreciate
how smart a moron is until you try to design a robot..."
-- Jerry Pournelle
I cited Python thus:
[16] G. van Rossum and F.L. Drake (eds), Python Reference Manual,
PythonLabs, Virginia, USA, 2001. Available at http://www.python.org
and Numerical Python thus:
[17] D. Ascher, P.F. Dubois, K. Hinsen, J. Hugunin and T. Oliphant,
Numerical Python, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore,
California, USA, 2001. Available at http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/
in a paper which will appear shortly in Computer Methods and Programs in
Biomedicine, and the editors seemed satisfied.
Tim C
Python -
1. Guido van Rossum <gu...@cwi.nl> 1991. A high-level interpreted
language combining ideas from ABC, C, Modula-3, Icon, etc. Intended for
prototyping or as an extension language for C applications. Modules,
classes, user-defined exceptions. "Linking a Stub Generator (AIL) to a
Prototyping Language (Python)", Guido van Rossum et al, Proc 1991 EurOpen
Spring Conf. Available for Unix, Amoeba and Mac. Version 1.0.0.
ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/python/python1.0.0.tar.Z
list: pytho...@cwi.nl
"Christopher Browne" <cbbr...@acm.org> wrote in message
news:acn2uu$qrhei$1...@ID-125932.news.dfncis.de...
Tim> Ross Lazarus wrote:
>> How should the Python language be cited in an academic
>> publication?
>>
>> For example, in
>> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
>> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than
>> formally citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate
>> primary source and recommended attribution?
>>
>> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
>> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at
>> http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html, but that doesn't seem as
>> complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed journal.
Tim> I cited Python thus:
Tim> [16] G. van Rossum and F.L. Drake (eds), Python Reference Manual,
Tim> PythonLabs, Virginia, USA, 2001. Available at
Tim> http://www.python.org
Tim> and Numerical Python thus:
Tim> [17] D. Ascher, P.F. Dubois, K. Hinsen, J. Hugunin and
Tim> T. Oliphant, Numerical Python, Lawrence Livermore National
Tim> Laboratory, Livermore, California, USA, 2001. Available at
Tim> http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/
Tim> in a paper which will appear shortly in Computer Methods and
Tim> Programs in Biomedicine, and the editors seemed satisfied.
I can't wait!
- Dave
to which Tim Churches replied:
> G. van Rossum and F.L. Drake (eds), Python Reference Manual,
> PythonLabs, Virginia, USA, 2001. Available at http://www.python.org
But maybe a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for Python would be a good
idea,
given the peripatetic nature of the core Python team over the last
several years. More information about DOIs can be found at
http://www.doi.org
The main way of implementing DOIs is via the Handle system (see
http://www.handle.net),
which was developed by none other than the Corporation for National
Research
Initiatives (CNRI), the former home of Python. Ironically, the Handle
system
appears to be implemented in Java.
Tim C
the original CWI reports are often used as references, e.g:
"G. van Rossum, Python tutorial, Technical Report CS-R9526,
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, May
1995."
also see:
http://www.python.org/~guido/Publications.html
fwiw, citeseer doesn't appear to have any citations for CNRI
or PythonLabs editions of those documents. I'm not sure that
should stop you from citing them, though...
</F>
One should always mention "http://www.python.org/". Additional points
of information may be added to taste.
--
Aahz (aa...@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/
"In the end, outside of spy agencies, people are far too trusting and
willing to help." --Ira Winkler