PackageCitations -- a package facilitating citation of Macaulay2 packages

Description

This is a modest package with lofty goals. It is modest because it is a package for a powerful open-source mathematical software suite but it contains only one method and adds exactly zero computational ability to the platform. The one method, called cite, can be called on any Macaulay2 package and will return a bibtex citation for inclusion in a LaTeX document. For example, a citation for this package can be obtained as follows.

i1 : cite "PackageCitations"

o1 = @misc{PackageCitationsSource,
       title = {{PackageCitations: citation of \emph{Macaulay2} packages. Version~0.1}},
       author = {Aaron Dall},
       howpublished = {A \emph{Macaulay2} package available at "https://github.com/aarondall/PackageCitations-M2"}
     }

The inner workings of cite are explained on the documentation page so we won't give any details here except to point out that the preferred citation for Macaulay2 can also be obtained with ease.

i2 : cite

o2 = @misc{M2,
       author = {Grayson, Daniel R. and Stillman, Michael E.},
       title = {Macaulay2, a software system for research in algebraic geometry},
       howpublished = {Available at \url{https://macaulay2.com/}}
     }

The initial benefit of having a fast and facile mechanism for citing packages should be that more users of the software will include citations in their work. This, of course, will benefit the community in a number of ways. First it will recognize the hard work of the coders in the Macaulay2 community and second it will serve as valuable promotion for the platform and encourage new users and coders to join the community.

Author

Aaron Dall <aaronmdall -at- gmail.com>

Version

This documentation describes version 0.1 of PackageCitations.

Source code

The source code from which this documentation is derived is in the file PackageCitations.m2.

Exports

Functions and commands
- cite -- obtain bibtex citations for Macaulay2 packages

For the programmer

The object PackageCitations is a package.