citation-file-format/ruby-cff

Is this "citation" indexed by anyone?

StellaAthena opened this issue · 2 comments

StellaAthena commented

For better or for worse, academic search engines are the de facto determiner of value in the academic world. Will Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, etc. consider GitHub repos with a CITATION.cff file an academic object? And will it track citations in academic papers using that identifier?

arfon commented

I think this is a question for these platforms (Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar) rather than this project but it's an excellent question. A couple of thoughts:

  • In many cases the CITATION.cff file is pointing to another record (e.g., a Zenodo DOI, or a paper in a journal). In those cases I would expect these search engines to be indexing those platforms.
  • In the case when the CITATION.cff file only includes descriptive information about the GitHub repository (i.e., no link to Zenodo, figshare...) then I agree that a CITATION.cff file would be a good signal to these platforms that this work is scholarly and perhaps should be indexed. Again though, this seems something mostly in their hands but perhaps something that could be advocated for within our respective communities.
StellaAthena commented

I think this is a question for these platforms (Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar) rather than this project but it's an excellent question. A couple of thoughts:

* In many cases the `CITATION.cff` file is pointing to another record (e.g., a Zenodo DOI, or a paper in a journal). In those cases I would expect these search engines to be indexing those platforms.

* In the case when the `CITATION.cff` file only includes descriptive information about the GitHub repository (i.e., no link to Zenodo, figshare...) then I agree that a `CITATION.cff` file would be a good signal to these platforms that this work is _scholarly_ and perhaps should be indexed. Again though, this seems something mostly in their hands but perhaps something that could be advocated for within our respective communities.

Yeah, my understanding is that GS ignores you if you don't have enough institutional support behind you unfortunately. This is a big problem for smaller researchers, for example despite being registered on Zenodo my GPT-Neo codebase has 3 citations according to Google Scholar despite the fact that it clearly identifies 17 citing papers. Google can ignore my emails, but maybe if GitHub goes to them and says "you should start tracking this" they'll care.

  • 👍1