About CITATION files
You can add a CITATION.cff file to the root of a repository to let others know how you would like them to cite your work. The citation file format is plain text with human- and machine-readable citation information.
Example CITATION.cff:
cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
authors:
- family-names: "Lisa"
given-names: "Mona"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
- family-names: "Bot"
given-names: "Hew"
orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
title: "My Research Software"
version: 2.0.4
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1234
date-released: 2017-12-18
url: "https://github.com/github/linguist"
For more information, see the Citation File Format website.
When you add a CITATION.cff file to the default branch of your repository, it is automatically linked from the repository landing page. This makes it easy for other users to cite your software project, using the information you've provided.
Citation formats
We currently support APA and BibTex file formats.
Are you looking for additional citation formats? GitHub uses a Ruby library, to parse the CITATION.cff files. You can request additional formats in the ruby-cff repository, or contribute them yourself.