Citing a Julia package

[Douglas Bates]

In https://github.com/dmbates/MixedModels.jl/issues/60na user asked how to cite a Julia package.  I don't have a research paper on the package to cite and was going to recommend citing the URL of the github repository at a specific release, e.g. https://github.com/dmbates/MixedModels.jl/releases/tag/v0.4.5

Can anyone suggest a better alternative?

[Keno Fischer]

You can set up https://zenodo.org/ for the repository and get a citable DOI for every release.

[Mauro]

If you don't plan to write a long-form paper about the package but would
still like to collect citations for it then you could submit to this
new journal http://joss.theoj.org/ .

From the about: "If you've already licensed your code and have good
documentation then we expect that it should take less than an hour to
prepare and submit your paper to JOSS."

Here an example "article" for a Julia package:
http://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.00042
and its review:
https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/42