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Academic citation for Python
How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?

For example, in
http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
and recommended attribution?

I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html,
but that doesn't seem as complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed
journal.
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
Ross Lazarus wrote:
>
> How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?

Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?

I don't think you can "cite" a language. Maybe specific facts about
the language, drawn from the "literature" (e.g. www.python.org), but
not "the language" itself.

Or are you trying to refer to the _source_ of the language, as in
where it comes from?

-Peter
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
In article <3CEEEE42.60D47318@engcorp.com>,
Peter Hansen <peter@engcorp.com> wrote:

> > How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?
>
> I don't think you can "cite" a language. Maybe specific facts about
> the language, drawn from the "literature" (e.g. www.python.org), but
> not "the language" itself.

I can't speak for the OP, but I can imagine situations in which I'm
writing an academic paper, and want to use Python to describe an
algorithm or something, but don't trust my audience to all know Python.
So, I'd say that my algorithm was written in Python [1], where the
numbered reference points to somewhere people could go to learn what
Python is. Is there a canonical source of information or should one
just pick one of the intro to Python programming books?

--
David Eppstein UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein@ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
Peter Hansen:
>Doesn't "to cite" mean simply to acknowledge a source of information?

"to cite" in context of an academic publication means two things.
First, the acknowledgement must be in the form acceptable by the
publication. For example, the MLA has a long list of descriptions
of accepted ways to format different sources.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for academics, it means the
specific information source, if there is more than one. For example,
in one project I worked on we said

The authors request that any published work which utilizes VMD please
include the following reference:
Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., `VMD - Visual Molecular
Dynamics', J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38

In this way we could track which people published papers using our
work. (There are services which most research libraries provide
to do this type of citation searches.) We used this partially to
justify our funding.

Like it or not, many academic careers are affected by "impact factors"
which are a measure of importance of a paper, based partially on the
number of citations to the paper. A researcher would prefer seeing
N cites to one paper rather than N cites to M papers, because it suggests
that paper had a higher impact.

As to how to cite Python... I don't know. Most things I've seen
(I just did a search) just point to python.org . One paper I have
uses Mark Lutz's "Programming Python" book, but I wouldn't regard
that as the proper citation.

Andrew
dalke@dalkescientific.com
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
Ross Lazarus wrote:
>
> How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> For example, in
> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
> citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
> and recommended attribution?
>
> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html,
> but that doesn't seem as complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed
> journal.

I cited Python thus:

[16] G. van Rossum and F.L. Drake (eds), Python Reference Manual,
PythonLabs, Virginia, USA, 2001. Available at http://www.python.org

and Numerical Python thus:

[17] D. Ascher, P.F. Dubois, K. Hinsen, J. Hugunin and T. Oliphant,
Numerical Python, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore,
California, USA, 2001. Available at http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/

in a paper which will appear shortly in Computer Methods and Programs in
Biomedicine, and the editors seemed satisfied.

Tim C
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
David Eppstein wrote:
>
> ... I can imagine situations in which I'm
> writing an academic paper, and want to use Python to describe an
> algorithm or something, but don't trust my audience to all know Python.
> So, I'd say that my algorithm was written in Python [1], where the
> numbered reference points to somewhere people could go to learn what
> Python is. Is there a canonical source of information or should one
> just pick one of the intro to Python programming books?

http://www.python.org/doc/current/ref/ref.html

Or just point them to www.python.org and let the intelligent readers
figure out where to go from there.

-Peter
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
The world rejoiced as Ross Lazarus <do_not_use_this_as_it_does_not_work@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> For example, in
> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
> citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
> and recommended attribution?
>
> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at
> http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html, but that doesn't seem as
> complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed journal.

Unlike languages like Ada and FORTRAN and Common Lisp, the creation of
Python didn't start with the creation of a "de jure" standard,
documented in academic or government papers; it came as an
implementation.

I'm not sure that there's any fundamentally better "primary source" to
look to than <http://www.python.org/>.

There might be some early paper by Guido van Rossum on Python that
would be of some value; that would be more likely to be a "secondary"
source, though.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "ac.notelrac.teneerf@" "454aa"))
http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/sgml.html
"...as a robotics designer once told me, you don't really appreciate
how smart a moron is until you try to design a robot..."
-- Jerry Pournelle
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
I really like Tim Church's citation, but I found this in a programming
language list started in March of 1991 at the University of Kansas by Tom
Rombouts:

Python -
1. Guido van Rossum <guido@cwi.nl> 1991. A high-level interpreted
language combining ideas from ABC, C, Modula-3, Icon, etc. Intended for
prototyping or as an extension language for C applications. Modules,
classes, user-defined exceptions. "Linking a Stub Generator (AIL) to a
Prototyping Language (Python)", Guido van Rossum et al, Proc 1991 EurOpen
Spring Conf. Available for Unix, Amoeba and Mac. Version 1.0.0.
ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/python/python1.0.0.tar.Z
list: python-list@cwi.nl

"Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne@acm.org> wrote in message
news:acn2uu$qrhei$1@ID-125932.news.dfncis.de...
> The world rejoiced as Ross Lazarus
<do_not_use_this_as_it_does_not_work@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> > How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
> >
> > For example, in
> > http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
> > author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
> > citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
> > and recommended attribution?
> >
> > I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
> > Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at
> > http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html, but that doesn't seem as
> > complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed journal.
>
> Unlike languages like Ada and FORTRAN and Common Lisp, the creation of
> Python didn't start with the creation of a "de jure" standard,
> documented in academic or government papers; it came as an
> implementation.
>
> I'm not sure that there's any fundamentally better "primary source" to
> look to than <http://www.python.org/>.
>
> There might be some early paper by Guido van Rossum on Python that
> would be of some value; that would be more likely to be a "secondary"
> source, though.
> --
> (reverse (concatenate 'string "ac.notelrac.teneerf@" "454aa"))
> http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/sgml.html
> "...as a robotics designer once told me, you don't really appreciate
> how smart a moron is until you try to design a robot..."
> -- Jerry Pournelle
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Churches <tchur@optushome.com.au> writes:

Tim> Ross Lazarus wrote:
>> How should the Python language be cited in an academic
>> publication?
>>
>> For example, in
>> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
>> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than
>> formally citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate
>> primary source and recommended attribution?
>>
>> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
>> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at
>> http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html, but that doesn't seem as
>> complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed journal.

Tim> I cited Python thus:

Tim> [16] G. van Rossum and F.L. Drake (eds), Python Reference Manual,
Tim> PythonLabs, Virginia, USA, 2001. Available at
Tim> http://www.python.org

Tim> and Numerical Python thus:

Tim> [17] D. Ascher, P.F. Dubois, K. Hinsen, J. Hugunin and
Tim> T. Oliphant, Numerical Python, Lawrence Livermore National
Tim> Laboratory, Livermore, California, USA, 2001. Available at
Tim> http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/

Tim> in a paper which will appear shortly in Computer Methods and
Tim> Programs in Biomedicine, and the editors seemed satisfied.

I can't wait!

- Dave

--
http://www.object-craft.com.au
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
Ross Lazarus wrote:

> How should the Python language be cited in an academic publication?
>
> For example, in
> http://bioinformatics.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/8/756.pdf the
> author mentions http://www.python.org in the text rather than formally
> citing the primary source - or is that the appropriate primary source
> and recommended attribution?
>
> I found "Copyright 1991-1995 by Stichting Mathematisch Centrum,
> Amsterdam, The Netherlands" at http://www.python.org/doc/Copyright.html,
> but that doesn't seem as complete or helpful as I'd like for a refereed
> journal.

the original CWI reports are often used as references, e.g:

"G. van Rossum, Python tutorial, Technical Report CS-R9526,
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, May
1995."

also see:

http://www.python.org/~guido/Publications.html

fwiw, citeseer doesn't appear to have any citations for CNRI
or PythonLabs editions of those documents. I'm not sure that
should stop you from citing them, though...

</F>
Academic citation for Python [ In reply to ]
In article <eppstein-4F7616.19442924052002@news.service.uci.edu>,
David Eppstein <eppstein@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>
>I can't speak for the OP, but I can imagine situations in which I'm
>writing an academic paper, and want to use Python to describe an
>algorithm or something, but don't trust my audience to all know Python.
>So, I'd say that my algorithm was written in Python [1], where the
>numbered reference points to somewhere people could go to learn what
>Python is. Is there a canonical source of information or should one
>just pick one of the intro to Python programming books?

One should always mention "http://www.python.org/". Additional points
of information may be added to taste.
--
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"In the end, outside of spy agencies, people are far too trusting and
willing to help." --Ira Winkler