Finding .bib reference to codes on gitlab

General
1

Hey,

so I wanted to find the right reference to the QLIMR module to cite and I just googled QLIMR that led to the gitlab link. But I couldn’t seem to find anywhere there where to cite it. To be clear, what I’m wanting is just the bibtex entry for this. I know this should be possible from this: Feature: Citation support for software repositories (#337368) · Issues · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab

I could be missing something or not looking in the right place, but if not could we please add this to all the codes?

What I would ideally like is a .bib that includes whatever relevant papers+ something that links back to gitlab so one can easily find the code itself.

2

Following up, after talking to Mateus, it looks like this link is not implimented yet. Thus, I suggest we add something we can at least copy from the readme to make things easier.

For example, picking on QLIMR I could imagine:

@misc{QLIMR,
author = “Conde-Ocazionez, Carlos and others”,
title = {{Q}uadrupole moment, Tidal {L}ove number, Moment of {I}nertia, {M}ass, and {R}adius {QLIMR}},
year = {2025},
publisher = {GitLab},
journal = {GitLab repository},
howpublished = {\url{NSF MUSES / Neutron Star QLIMR / QLIMR module · GitLab}},
commit = {2426f129c5c344ec59a8f658f96f055afaa3b99b}
}

@article{Conde-Ocazionez:2025agu,
author = “Conde-Ocazionez, Carlos and Yin, Tuojin and Noronha-Hostler, Jaquelyn and Yunes, Nicol{'a}s”,
title = “{Highly-accurate neutron star modeling in the Hartle-Thorne Approximation}”,
eprint = “2505.19400”,
archivePrefix = “arXiv”,
primaryClass = “gr-qc”,
month = “5”,
year = “2025”
}

@article{ReinkePelicer:2025vuh,
author = “Reinke Pelicer, Mateus and others”,
title = “{Building neutron stars with the MUSES calculation engine}”,
eprint = “2502.07902”,
archivePrefix = “arXiv”,
primaryClass = “nucl-th”,
doi = “10.1103/PhysRevD.111.103037”,
journal = “Phys. Rev. D”,
volume = “111”,
number = “10”,
pages = “103037”,
year = “2025”
}

3

@jakinh I’m talking to Carlos, and we think this might lead too a big README in the long run. To avoid that, we can have a separate .bib file in the repository with all citations related to the code, and link it in the README.

It would be in the same way that I have the CHANGELOG and the Documentation linked in Lepton.

Does that work?

1 Like
4

Yes! We perhaps did not push hard enough on this when we promoted it originally.

My opinion is that the primary citation should be to a DOI-linked record on a service like Zenodo. That is where people should be directed from citations in a journal article. From the Zenodo record, they should find links to the active source code repo(s) and related websites and datasets. From the source repo they should find a Readme that directs them to the CITATION.cff file and any desired BibTeX files (as well as links back to the Zenodo DOIs).

5

Andrew, I agree with you that the primary one should be Zenodo but I want to have something that people can just copy from GitLAB as well. Scientists can be quite lazy for these things, and I would like the info in as many places as possible

6

I totally agree that redundancy is a good thing here. It just takes more discipline to ensure the self-consistency required for a well-connected link graph.

1 Like