Add a citation file

A CITATION.cff lets reference managers and GitHub cite your software correctly.

A cff file is a plaintext file with .cff extension containing information that can be picked up by a reference manager to generate clean citations. It follows a yaml format, which is both human- and machine-readable.

See the example below from Maddison Simon’s and Sophie Schmidt’s Percopackage for some common information to include in your cff:

cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
authors:
  - family-names: Maddison
    given-names: M. Simon
    orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5006-6604
  - family-names: Schmidt
    given-names: Sophie C.
    orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4696-2101
title: "Percopackage"
version: 0.0.0.9001
identifiers:
  - type: doi
    value: 10.17605/OSF.IO/7EXTC
date-released: 2024-08-24

Further reading

• Citation File Format
• Percopackage’s CFF: https://github.com/SCSchmidt/percopackage/blob/master/CITATION.cff