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How to cite this repository in scientific literature #4306
Description
Hi there!
We are currently in the process of writing a scientific publication on our research data management library ARCtrl. It is a polyglot library targeting multiple programming languages via Fable from F# source code. The design process behind this will also be a large part of the paper.
In scientific publications, sources are usually referred to via some stable identifier reference like DOI. Is there a publication about Fable that we can/should reference? (Interestingly, there seems to be a Fortran -> C++ compiler named FABLE 😆)
If not, a free and easy way to obtain a DOI for a code repository is Zenodo. It integrates into the GitHub release process and publishes a snapshot of the repository alongside publication metadata such as authors and contributors. Here is the zenodo record of ARCtrl as reference. If there is interest, i can help setting this up for this repository. Otherwise we can also just reference the fable website or this repo, but website references are not best practice because they can change, while DOIs are meant to be stable.
cc @Freymaurer
Activity
MangelMaxime commentedon Dec 23, 2025
Hello,
I didn't look too much in the details of Zenodo but seems to work in a similar fashion to Github release.
Looking at this guide, it seems like this how they make their integration. Is it the guide you followed?
kMutagene commentedon Dec 26, 2025
@MangelMaxime Yes, in addition to that you can add a
.zenodo.jsonfile to the repository that contains the record metadata. Otherwise zenodo will get names from the contributors github profile, and if there are none it will put the github handles there which might look a little weird: https://help.zenodo.org/docs/github/describe-software/zenodo-json/For a repo with as many contributors as this i would suggest splitting between the core maintainers as
creatorsand other contributors ascontributors. I would however let zenodo infer the rest such asversionfrom the github release metadata. Once this is set up, it will automatically add new versions to the existing record. This has the added benefit that this beautiful piece of code is archived somewhere else than github ;)