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A bibliographic style for software

Software is a pillar of modern research, and yet, up to now no support for citing software projects was available in any common bibliographic style.

Change is finally coming: this message is to announce the availability of the biblatex-software package , that adds support for properly managing software entries in bibliographies for BibLaTeX

You can find it on CTAN.

biblatex-software introduces four specific bibliographic entries for describing respectively software, software versions, software modules and code fragments, designed by a dedicated task force at Inria composed of Pierre Alliez, Roberto Di Cosmo, Benjamin Guedj, Alain Girault, Mohand-Said Hacid, Arnaud Legrand, Morane Gruenpeter, Xavier Leroy, Nicolas Rougier and Manuel Serrano.

The code fragment entry allows to precisely pinpoint excerpts of programs, and is particularly effective when used in conjunction with the guidelines for archiving and referencing artefacts in Software Heritage: you can see a detailed example of use in this recent replication study: Roberto Di Cosmo, Marco Danelutto [Rp] Reproducing and replicating the OCamlP3l experiment. ReScience C, 6 (1), 2020.

This is actually a bibliography style extension, which means that one can add support for these four software entry types to any other BibLaTeX style used in documents typeset in LaTeX, including in particular the biblatex style for ACM articles. It requires the Biber back end, though, so do not try it with pure BibTeX.

Full documentation and examples are included in the package, see in particular

We hope that this style will allow you to better highlight software in your future publications.

Contributions are welcome, especially on localization strings (English and French are already done) on: https://gitlab.inria.fr/gt-sw-citation/bibtex-sw-entry

See also this contribution of the Working Group