[R] Citing Package Contributing Authors

[Achim Zeileis]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2013, Charles Determan Jr wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I am familiar with the function cite('packageName') which provides the 
> output generated from the DESCRIPTION file.

...unless the package provides a CITATION file. Then, citation('pkg') 
shows the content of the CITATION. citation('pkg', auto = TRUE) always 
shows the auto-generated citation based on the DESCRIPTION.

> In most cases this is sufficient but I was wondering if there are 
> contributing authors (in addition to the primary) also listed on the 
> CRAN page.  Is there a proper way to account for them or are they 
> generally not listed?

In recent versions of R, package developers have the possiblity to assign 
roles to the persons contributing to an R package (based on the MARC 
vocabulary). If this has been done, then citation('pkg', auto = TRUE) 
lists all persons with an "author" role but none of the others (e.g., 
contributors, translators, thesis advisors, etc.). See
http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2012-1/RJournal_2012-1_Hornik~et~al.pdf
for details.

If there is neither a CITATION file nor a DESCRIPTION with Authors at R 
(using the role vocabulary mentioned above) then it is not quite clear who 
exactly should be cited and who not. I think in most cases, it is ok to 
omit persons described by "with contributions by..." etc.

Hth,
Z


> Regards,
>
> -- 
> Charles Determan
> Integrated Biosciences PhD Candidate
> University of Minnesota
>
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>
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