Centres
German Aerospace Center (DLR)Contributing organisations
Netherlands eScience Center , University of ManchesterKeywords
software citation Citation File Format metadata research software sustainabilityResearch field
InformationScientific community
Research Software Engineering, Library and Information Science, Computer Science (Software Engineering), Scholarly CommunicationsFunding
- Software Sustainability Insitute (SSI), UK
- Code for Science & Society, US
- CampusSource e.V., DE
Programming Languages
YAML, JSON Schema, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Julia, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, TypeScriptLicense
CC-BY-4.0Costs
freeCite
10.5281/zenodo.1003149Contact
stephan.druskat@dlr.deResources
The Citation File Format - making software citation easi(er)
The citation of software is important to enable attribution and credit for developers of research software and reproducibility. In comparison to more traditional research outputs such as papers, software does not inherently provide the necessary metadata to cite it correctly. Therefore it is necessary for software authors to provide these metadata, including software-specific metadata such as version identifiers, source code repositories and license information.
The Citation File Format (CFF) is a community project that provides
a human- and machine-readable format and schema for software citation metadata files (CITATION.cff
),
as well as tools for working with the format.
This way, software authors can supply the relevant metadata for their software,
and both human users and downstream services can use and reuse the respective metadata.
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cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
authors:
- family-names: Druskat
given-names: Stephan
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4925-7248
title: "My Research Software"
version: 2.0.4
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1234
date-released: 2021-08-11
The Citation File Format project provides tooling for creating, editing, updating, validating, and converting CFF files in a number of programming languages/technologies. All tools as well as the schema and documentation are published under open licenses.
CFF is supported by several platforms in academia and software development;
GitHub uses CITATION.cff
files to render citation information for repositories;
Zenodo - a universal open access repository for digital research artifacts - uses the information in
CFF files to populate record metadata in automated workflows;
Reference managers such as Zotero and JabRef support the import of software citation metadata from CFF files.

The Citation File Format schema is written in JSON Schema.
CFF files instances are implemented in YAML.
As of June 2022, more than 9,000 CITATION.cff
files have been created on GitHub alone.
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