Sunday 2 June 2019

citations - How can I cite software documentations?


As my bachelor's thesis, I'm developing some software (a mocking framework for MATLAB). As such, I often need to reference software documentation - both from MATLAB and the software which serves as my inspiration. It would also be nice to be able to reference the documentation of the specific feature I'm referring to (the analogue of referencing a specific page in a book). However, I mostly access this documentation online and by its nature it tends to exist just in electronic form, which is not really recommended in publishing. So far, the best I've come up with is this:


@misc{mockitoFeatures,
author = {{\em mockito} developers},
title = {Features and Motivations},
note = {\url{https://code.google.com/p/mockito/wiki/FeaturesAndMotivations}},
urldate = {2013-04-24},

}

(ok strictly speaking, this isn't part of the official docs but it serves the same purpose: it's a specific page and it's only available online)


Specific questions:



  • Who should be the author? In the case of MATLAB I guess it's Mathworks or somesuch; I guess listing open-source projects as "xx developers" is the best I can do.

  • How should I mention the version? Urldate helps in general, but if I'm referring to a particular software version, where should I put this info? In the title?

  • Are there any "official" MATLAB citation recommendations? MATLAB is used in research a lot, perhaps there's a suggested way of doing it and I'm just missing it. The rest of the question still applies for other software, though.




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