[petsc-dev] PetscCitations: software or underlying math

[Matthew Knepley]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> This is responding to Matt's comment, which is a topic that we could use
> more feedback on.
>
>
> https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/0a8e8854d85628d5034c7879b76533cb3504de85#general-comments
>
> Should the formal citations list (produced when running with -citations)
> include underlying mathematical work or only tangible software that is
> being executed?  I'm hesitant to include the mathematical background, at
> least by default, because it is inherently non-scalable.
>

I think we can differentiate between mathematical background and analysis,
e.g.

  Proving that GMRES converges with these matrices, etc.

and showing exactly how to structure an algorithm:

  Saad and Schultz, 96

I am for including publications that show how to structure things even if
they
do not produce code. I think in the future these kinds of publications will
also
feature code since the culture is changing.


> We could perhaps have multiple levels of verbosity, one of which is
> basically "further reading".
>

I think this could also be useful.


> Even with only software, applying automated citations recursively is a
> scalability risk similar to the advertising clause in 4-clause BSD,
> though the standard for publication about software tends to
> self-regulate a bit, along with the relative dearth of people interested
> in maintaining scientific software packages.
>

If this does come to pass, we can add a "superceded" tag or something.

   Matt


> What do you think PetscCitations should be?
>



-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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