citing Clojure and EDN?

[vra...@gmail.com]

For the purposes of academic publications (in areas well outside of SIGPLAN and such), are there any preferred citations for Clojure and EDN? Or could a recommendation for a citation for both (especially EDN) be proposed if there isn't one currently?

[Alex Miller]

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but the EDN spec is https://github.com/edn-format/edn and was written by Rich Hickey. Seems like that is what you should cite.

I don't know what it would mean to "cite" Clojure - it is software, written by many people over a period of years. Rich Hickey is the sole or join copyright holder on all of it. I don't know how software like this is cited but here's one thread suggesting some ideas: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1230811.

[Alex Miller]

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but the EDN spec is https://github.com/edn-format/edn and was written by Rich Hickey. Seems like that is what you should cite.

I don't know what it would mean to "cite" Clojure - it is software, written by many people over a period of years. Rich Hickey is the sole or join copyright holder on all of it. I don't know how software like this is cited but here's one thread suggesting some ideas: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1230811.

On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 9:42:05 PM UTC-5, vra...@gmail.com wrote:

[Phillip Lord]

Cite the URL. It's the correct identifier, it's got the relevant data on
it, and it's archived in archive.org.

If the journal editor or other academic tells you that you need a
"proper" academic reference, just ignore them, because they are wrong.

Phil

[Christopher Small]

I have never had to cite Clojure, but I have cited other software packages that didn't have publications. In general, if there is an actual academic publication, it's best to cite that. Frequently there isn't of course, and in those cases I've cited the web address.

Cheers

Chris

[Phillip Lord]

Actually, I am not sure I would agree. For example, there are quite a
few publications on Scala but most of the academic publications are
about something; so, the semantics of it's type system, or the blending
of function and OO or so on. So, which should you cite? Well, you could
pick the language spec, of course, and scala has a very nice one (well,
long anyway, haven't read it). But even this is about the semantics of
the language, and not Scala as in "I used Scala to do this" which is
about the language, the runtime and the tool chain.

The idea that you can't cite websites is a conceit that ensures that
academics continue to spend a 1000s of pounds a paper on puplication
costs, when you can achieve much the same with a blog, some metadata and
archive.org.

Ah, that was good, I feel better now!

Phil

Christopher Small <metas...@gmail.com> writes:
> I have never had to cite Clojure, but I have cited other software packages
> that didn't have publications. In general, if there is an actual academic
> publication, it's best to cite that. Frequently there isn't of course, and
> in those cases I've cited the web address.
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:19:29 AM UTC-7, Phillip Lord wrote:
>>
>>
>> Cite the URL. It's the correct identifier, it's got the relevant data on
>> it, and it's archived in archive.org.
>>
>> If the journal editor or other academic tells you that you need a
>> "proper" academic reference, just ignore them, because they are wrong.
>>
>> Phil
>>

>> <vra...@gmail.com <javascript:>> writes:
>>
>> > For the purposes of academic publications (in areas well outside of
>> SIGPLAN
>> > and such), are there any preferred citations for Clojure and EDN? Or
>> could
>> > a recommendation for a citation for both (especially EDN) be proposed if
>> > there isn't one currently?
>>

--
Phillip Lord, Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Email: philli...@newcastle.ac.uk
School of Computing Science, http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
Room 914 Claremont Tower, skype: russet_apples
Newcastle University, twitter: phillord
NE1 7RU

[Ben Wolfson]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Phillip Lord <philli...@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:

The idea that you can't cite websites is a conceit that ensures that
academics continue to spend a 1000s of pounds a paper on puplication
costs, when you can achieve much the same with a blog, some metadata and
archive.org.

Ah, that was good, I feel better now!

The woes of academic publishing have nothing to do with the idea that you can't cite websites; MLA and Chicago style both have provisions for citing websites and I'm sure less widespread style guides do as well.

--
Ben Wolfson
"Human kind has used its intelligence to vary the flavour of drinks, which may be sweet, aromatic, fermented or spirit-based. ... Family and social life also offer numerous other occasions to consume drinks for pleasure." [Larousse, "Drink" entry]

[Christopher Small]

I'm not disagreeing with you. When you're talking about a language, and none of the papers specifically points to the language as a whole - that's fine. But in the case of specific software packages/programs, I think it is often better to cite a paper if it exists. For example, if I write a paper that uses BEAST in an analysis, I'm going to cite the paper for BEAST, not the BEAST website. But if I cite R, I'll cite the website (as running `citation()` from the command line suggests I should).

However, I think you're generalizing a bit too strongly when it comes to academic publications. For example, BEAST2 was published in an Open Access, online only journal called PLoS (http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003537). No paper need apply, and all of the content is CC :-) That's not to say that PLoS isn't an island of refuge in sea of ossified stodginess, or that even it couldn't be better in ways. But it's not all so bad, and does serve some purpose. Something to consider is this - citing a paper (if it exists) could be more beneficial professionally for the authors of the paper, as those things are (I think) tracked more closely.

Lastly, sometimes formats have publications. For example - http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0031009. I don't know if Edn does or not though. I would just search around for one, or cite the website if you don't find it.

Chris

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[Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant]

Here's a good citation for Clojure: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1408682

Thanks,

Ambrose

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[Phillip Lord]

Ben Wolfson <wol...@gmail.com> writes:
>> The idea that you can't cite websites is a conceit that ensures that
>> academics continue to spend a 1000s of pounds a paper on puplication
>> costs, when you can achieve much the same with a blog, some metadata and
>> archive.org.
>>
>> Ah, that was good, I feel better now!
>>
>
> The woes of academic publishing have nothing to do with the idea that you
> can't cite websites; MLA and Chicago style both have provisions for citing
> websites and I'm sure less widespread style guides do as well.

Of course, it's possible to do this technically, it's a social issue
mostly. Anyway, I was ranting, don't take it too seriously.

Phil

[Giovanni Gherdovich]

Hello,

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:42 AM, <vra...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the purposes of academic publications
> (in areas well outside of SIGPLAN and such),
> are there any preferred citations for Clojure and EDN?

loosely related to this old thread, today I have read that github

has worked out a way to stick a DOI ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier )

to a repository:

https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science

it was on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744735 .

Cheers,

GGhh

[Phillip Lord]

Giovanni Gherdovich <g.gher...@gmail.com> writes:
>> For the purposes of academic publications
>> (in areas well outside of SIGPLAN and such),
>> are there any preferred citations for Clojure and EDN?
>
> loosely related to this old thread, today I have read that github
> has worked out a way to stick a DOI (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier )
> to a repository:
>
> https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science
>
> it was on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744735 .
>

Again, based on the dubious ID that an DOI "makes things citable".

A URL is already citable!

Phil

[Jony Hudson]

On Thursday, 15 May 2014 14:58:50 UTC+1, Phillip Lord wrote:

Again, based on the dubious ID that an DOI "makes things citable".

A URL is already citable!

Well, there's no shortage of broken links out there to suggest that people have trouble keeping content associated with stable URLs. The main value of DOI, IMHO, is they're an explicit commitment to make something persistently available - just what you want for citations.

Jony

[Phillip Lord]

Actually, they don't. I've broken quite a few DOIs in my time. What they
offer is the guarantee that a DOI will not be handed out twice. So, you
avoid the situation where a domain name is unregistered, someone else
buys it, and the links are replaced with porn.

Now, there is an explicit commitment from crossref (one of the nine
bodies that hands out DOIs) over the way that the DOI resolves and what
is resolves to. But the strength of this commitment comes from a social
and legal agreement, not a technological one. So, URIs such as
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ offer the same guarantee of stability.
Indeed, the display standard for representing DOIs is that is
represented as a URI. So URIs are not intrinsincally unstable. And the
W3C URL has the *big* advantage that it does not require a two-step
resolution. So, the URI that you see in your browser is the URI that you
use. With a DOI, the URI is a passing, ephemeral thing.


DOIs are treated as some sort of magic -- figshare use the "make data
citable" tagline largely on the basis of "hey, it's got a DOI"; I find
this over-simplistic. DOIs have their place, but it is not everywhere,
and they are not automatically better than a URI.

Phil