Ben AmbridgeMay 1, 2023
Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez

{grateful} is now on CRAN!

{grateful} makes it very easy to cite #Rstats packages, so that software authors get their deserved credit

https://pakillo.github.io/grateful/

Thread 1/

Facilitate Citation of R Packages

Facilitates the citation of R packages used in analysis projects. Scans project for packages used, gets their citations, and produces a document with citations in the preferred bibliography format, ready to be pasted into reports or manuscripts. Alternatively, grateful can be used directly within an R Markdown or Quarto document.

Apr 24, 2023 at 12:15pmWeb
Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 24, 2023

2/ Just run

grateful::cite_packages()

and you'll get a report with formatted citations and references for all the #rstats packages used in your analysis, ready to paste into your manuscript or report

Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 24, 2023

3/ This citation report can be generated in HTML, PDF, Word docx, Markdown...

References can be formatted automatically for any journal, eg.

cite_packages(citation. style = "peerj")

Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 24, 2023

4/ {grateful} can also be used with #Rmarkdown and @quarto_pub #Quartopub

Just call cite_packages() within a chunk.

See templates in the package repo: https://github.com/Pakillo/grateful/tree/master/Rmd_Quarto

grateful/Rmd_Quarto at master · Pakillo/grateful

Facilitate citation of R packages. Contribute to Pakillo/grateful development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 24, 2023

5/ It's also possible to include recursive dependencies of the used packages, to make credit transitive:

cite_packages(dependencies = TRUE)

Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 24, 2023

6/ {grateful} is my first pkg on CRAN. It serves well to communicate our gratitude as well as our wish to give back to the #Rstats community.

Great thanks to Connor Jackson and @shauritacodes for their great contributions

Happy citing!

Show threadJuliaRApr 24, 2023
@frod_san Very neat! I will use it!
Show threadStephan DruskatApr 26, 2023

@frod_san Are you aware of the {cffr} #RStats package that produces CITATION.cff files for R? There seems to be some overlap, and perhaps there is value in letting the two interface with each other?

https://github.com/ropensci/cffr

#CitationFileFormat #SoftwareCitation

GitHub - ropensci/cffr: Generate Citation File Format (cff) Metadata for R Packages

Generate Citation File Format (cff) Metadata for R Packages - GitHub - ropensci/cffr: Generate Citation File Format (cff) Metadata for R Packages

GitHub
Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 26, 2023

@sdruskat

Thanks. Trying to understand how CITATION.cff could be used.

Are CITATION.cff files locally available for packages installed from CRAN, GitHub, etc? Or would we need to search for CITATION.cff in online repos every time we want to cite them?

cc @dhernangomez

Show threadD. HernangómezApr 26, 2023
@frod_san @sdruskat CITATION.cff files are available in GitHub repos only. As by now CRAN checks shows a "non-standard file" NOTE. However it is easy to recreate a CITATION.cff file for an installed package, just do cffr::cff_create("dplyr")
Show threadD. HernangómezApr 26, 2023
@frod_san @sdruskat on top of that there is a parser `cff_to_bibtex()` that creates R bibentry objects from a CITATION.cff file, so they can be further manipulated with R. Probably this may be interesting for you
Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 26, 2023

@dhernangomez @sdruskat

Thanks. What would be the advantages of creating the cff on the fly compared to calling citation()?

({grateful} calls citation() to generate BibTeX references)

Show threadD. HernangómezApr 26, 2023
@frod_san @sdruskat That is in fact redundant, no advantage. Given the purpose of grateful the only profit I see with cffr is that you can add information from a cff file to the bib file created with grateful, see https://github.com/Pakillo/grateful/issues/35
CITATION.cff files · Issue #35 · Pakillo/grateful

Hi, this is a follow-up of the conversation on mastodon @sdruskat https://scholar.social/@sdruskat/110264829977856739 Just for introducing you a bit the cffr package this is a quick demo that show:...

GitHub
Show threadFrancisco Rodriguez-SanchezApr 26, 2023

@dhernangomez @sdruskat

Thanks Diego. Following up in the github thread

Show threadStephan DruskatApr 26, 2023

@dhernangomez @frod_san Thanks for taking over, @dhernangomez, I wouldn't have enough experience with #RStats packaging myself.

What you've written makes sense, in that the packages serve different purposes, and can peacefully coexist 🙂.

Just to add that use of #CitationFileFormat files isn't restricted to GitHub of course, but GitHub makes the most visible use of them. (They'd still be useful on another platform or in, say, a distributed zip file.)