Citation Files

Citation files help researchers and developers properly cite your software in academic publications.

Why it matters

Without a citation file, people writing a paper about work that used your software have to guess at the version, guess at the authors, and often cite a GitHub URL that will not resolve in five years. A CITATION.cff in the repository root replaces that guessing with a file a tool can read.

GitHub renders it as a "Cite this repository" button, and the reference formats below it, so the most likely reader — someone on the web page — never has to open the file at all.

What it looks like

cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
title: "Learn Git With Me"
abstract: "A free, open-source platform for learning Git and GitHub."
type: software
version: 1.4.0
date-released: "2026-09-27"
license: MIT
repository-code: "https://github.com/spaciousejar/learn-git-with-me"
authors:
  - family-names: Jadhav
    given-names: Vicky
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
keywords:
  - git
  - version control
  - github

cff-version is required and pins the format. message is what tells a reader what to do with the citation, and the reference formats appear in citation styles including APA, BibTeX and Chicago.

Checking it

The format is validated, and a malformed file fails the check rather than producing a broken citation:

pip install cffconvert
cffconvert --validate
cffconvert --informat yaml --format bibtex CITATION.cff

Run it in CI if the file is maintained by hand, so a typo is caught at the pull request rather than by a reader.

Which version

The temptation is to update version on every release. That defeats the point — a citation that says "latest" cannot identify what a paper actually used. Bump it when you cut a release, and leave it alone otherwise, so the file records which release a citation refers to.

For a project with no formal releases, date-released with a version of 0.0.0 and a note is more honest than inventing version numbers. See Pushing Tags for marking releases.

CITATION.cff Format

The Citation File Format (CFF) is a human and machine-readable format for software citation metadata.

cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "If you use this software, please cite it as below."
authors:
- family-names: "Doe"
  given-names: "Jane"
title: "My Research Software"
version: 2.0.4
date-released: 2023-01-01
url: "https://github.com/example/my-software"

Benefits

• Easier academic citation
• GitHub integration
• DOI support
• Version tracking