rseng-citation-metadata

# Making research software citable and credited Use this skill when someone wants their research software to be cited, discovered, and formally recognised: adding a citation file, writing machine-readable metadata, getting a persistent identifier, or building an evidence base of who contributed. Software has no title page, so the information needed to cite it is often hard to find - a citation file and structured metadata are what let both humans and tools cite the exact work correctly. Advise concrete files in the repository root, not abstractions. ## Start here: what a citable project needs For most projects, recommend all four in the repository root: 1. `CITATION.cff` - machine-readable citation metadata. 2. `codemeta.json` - richer discovery/interoperability metadata. 3. A DOI from an archive like Zenodo, minted per release. 4. A `CONTRIBUTORS` file - human-readable team record alongside the machine-readable ones. A software citation itself should carry: title, the specific version used, authors/creators, a DOI or other stable link, and the repository URL - the version matters for reproducibility. ## Write a CITATION.cff file The Citation File Format is a structured plaintext (YAML) format; a valid `CITATION.cff` in the repo root is reused automatically by GitHub, Zenodo, and Zotero. Do not hand-craft the syntax from memory - point the user at the CFFINIT generator, or start from the official example and validate with cffconvert. Checklist of core fields to pop...