How to Cite GeoCAT
The GeoCAT project has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which is a persistent identifier for web-based resources. The benefit of DOIs is that they are widely accepted by academic publishers as citable locators for scholarly objects. The GeoCAT DOI, when used in URL form, https://doi.org/10.5065/a8pp-4358, provides a persistent link to the GeoCAT web page, and can be used to cite the GeoCAT project as a whole.
In addition, each GeoCAT tool is assigned a separate DOI per version to allow users to access older releases. This ensures that users are not only able to cite the specific software version through DOIs but are also able to download & use the corresponding release for reproducibility purposes.
If you author a paper that involves data analysis and/or visualization performed with the use of any GeoCAT software, we would like to ask you to please cite GeoCAT software toolkits you used. This helps (1) us better understand the impact of the software on the scientific community, which in turn helps us maintain support for the effort, as well as (2) make the research made with scientific software tools reproducible.
Citing the whole GeoCAT effort
You can cite the entire GeoCAT project using the following citation text:
Visualization & Analysis Systems Technologies. (2019). Geoscience Community Analysis Toolkit. Boulder, CO: NSF NCAR Computational and Information Systems Lab. doi:10.5065/a8pp-4358.
Citing GeoCAT software packages
If you would like to cite any GeoCAT software without referring to a specific version, use the following text:
Visualization & Analysis Systems Technologies. (<Year>). Geoscience Community Analysis Toolkit: <Software package name> [Software]. Boulder, CO: NSF NCAR Computational and Information Systems Lab. doi:<DOI>.
DOI for each GeoCAT software tool can be found in their own GitHub repository or documentation. In the above citation text, update the software package name and the year of package’s initialization as appropriate. For example, if you used GeoCAT-comp (i.e. the computational component of GeoCAT):
Visualization & Analysis Systems Technologies. (2019). Geoscience Community Analysis Toolkit: GeoCAT-comp [Software]. Boulder, CO: NSF NCAR Computational and Information Systems Lab. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6607205.
Instead, if you would like to cite a specific version of any GeoCAT software, use the following text:
Visualization & Analysis Systems Technologies. (Year). Geoscience Community Analysis Toolkit: <Software package name> (v<version>) [Software]. Boulder, CO, USA: NSF NCAR Computational and Information Systems Lab. doi:<DOI>.
URLs to version-specific DOIs for each GeoCAT software tool can be found in their own GitHub repository or documentation. In the above citation text, update the year of the version, GeoCAT package version, and DOI as appropriate. For example, if you used version 2022.04.0 of GeoCAT-comp (i.e. computational component of GeoCAT):
Visualization & Analysis Systems Technologies. (2022). Geoscience Community Analysis Toolkit: GeoCAT-comp (v2022.04.0) [Software]. Boulder, CO, USA: NSF NCAR Computational and Information Systems Lab. doi:10.5281/zenodo.6607349.
For more information about DOIs, see http://www.doi.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier.