Saturday, 18 June 2016

publications - How do I reference the Python programming language in a thesis or a paper?


I'm writing a scientific article and a dissertation in biology, for which I used Python for simulations. Some people in our department, especially the "non-computer-people", don't know what Python is, so I want to reference something helpful. Open-Source scientific tools such as CellProfiler usually tell you how to reference them, but Python doesn't.



How is the Python language properly referenced? Are there any articles in journals available I could link to?



Answer



In order to cite a programming language, a possible way is to cite the reference manual, including the version of the language you use (your approach might no longer work with the version of Python available in 20 years ...).


For instance, you can have a citation like:



Python Software Foundation. Python Language Reference, version 2.7. Available at http://www.python.org



According to this thread, you can also cite the original CWI TR:



"G. van Rossum, Python tutorial, Technical Report CS-R9526, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, May 1995."




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