No, it wasn't you. I didn't mention their username as I don't want to make it look like I'm calling someone out in a thread and I don't want to appear to be harassing other site members.
They haven't posted in a couple of years. Instead of calling them out by name, I'll just go ahead and link to the thread:
At first, I was thinking it couldn't be true - but then I noticed your username. As I mentioned, I've seen you post before and I didn't think you'd be dishonest. So, I figured I'd go investigate.
It is definitely unconventional. Another poster mentioned it violated GNUs guidelines but I doubt that is true. The GNU folks are, shall we say, really big on remaining ethically consistent. If it violated their guidelines, I'm really certain they'd remove it from their site.
I am not sure I like the precedent that it sets, though I am not seeing it copied by other projects.
Like you, I get why they might do it but, now that I know about it, I don't like the idea of it. I'm not irate, or even perturbed really. It absolutely wouldn't stop me from using the software if I needed it.
It does make me curious as to when people stopped listing their tools. I have academic publications with my name on them, so I know you should cite your tools so that others can reproduce your work.
That is the whole reason you cite your tools, reproducability. It absolutely shouldn't be because of academic fame for the creator of the tools. It shouldn't be about the toolmaker at all. You cite tools, and versions of said tools, so that others can reproduce your work and, if they can't, they can see if it isn't reproducible due to part of the tool chain being different.
In fact, that's one of the great reasons for preferring permissability-based software licenses - so that you have permission to share the exact version of the tools you used to do your research. Citing the toolset just to ensure the author gets a higher counted number is less than optimal.
I realize this veers off-topic but I wonder where things went wrong? I finished my dissertation in the early 1990s and haven't published anything since. I took my newly minted doctorate and headed for the private sector. Perhaps someone who remained in academia knows?
I am really curious as to when this changed and why it changed? Begging for citations, for something that should give very little credit, shouldn't be a thing. Worse, the situation should never be that someone feels pressured to do so. How did it even get to this point? What did I miss?
I have to assume that gnu parallel is currently meeting gnu's guidelines here, perhaps by allowing users to mute the nag. I do wonder if this particular guideline was written specifically for parallel.
> It does make me curious as to when people stopped listing their tools.
That's an interesting question! Certainly some people still do list their tools.
My story isn't entirely different than yours, but I've continued to publish occasionally since my thesis, as well as edit and review papers for several journals.
For me, I think it comes down to methodology. If a program used represents previous research, then it should be cited. If a program used does factor into the methodology of the paper, then citing it for reproducibility is a great idea. If either of those are true with parallel, I will absolutely cite gnu parallel.
But parallel is generally used only to speed things up, and does not affect the methodology at all. I guess it could be nice for reproducibility, in case there are bugs. But if parallel is only used incidentally like that, and the publication isn't about parallelism, and parallelism doesn't affect the output, it's not something you should cite. The journals I've submitted to would normally ask you to remove noise like that if you included it. (And as an editor, I've asked people to remove non-academic references, or at the very least footnote them instead.)
I realize it's not a widespread problem, but take the idea to a logical extreme -- do I cite all my tools? Should I cite my version of Linux, and include that I used zsh instead of bash? I process my output using sed, Perl, awk, Python, numpy, and I did my user experiements using Chrome 55 with JavaScript and Angular. The list of tools I use is very long. As a paper reviewer or editor, I'd be annoyed if I had to wade through that. And the number of tools that affect the methodology is small, those are the ones I care about.
An author should simply include their entire source code as a single citation, rather than individually cite any tools. That satisfies reproducibility without adding any unnecessary noise to the appendix, or treating gnu parallel as a part of the research when it's used only incidentally.
Also, Ole's really asking for PR more than he's asking for academic citations. There are lots of other ways to give him PR and help him. I feel like the emphasis on academics in his citation nag is slightly separate from the overall goal.
If you look there, he says, "... please cite as per ..." So, it isn't required as a part of the license or condition of use. It's just begging.
I suspect that's how it's not in violation of the GNU terms and GPLv3, but I'm not an expert.
And you should cite what version of Perl you used, for example. You should also ensure the source for Perl is available for future researchers. That's why open source is so valuable in academia.
Obviously there is a reasonable limit. If it potentially had an impact, cite it. The key word is reasonable.
I don't know enough about parallel to comment about the viability of it impacting the output. I still find it alarming that they feel compelled to beg for citations.
Also, yeah, when I cited software, it went into the acknowledgments section. This being a different era, I included my email address (the Internet was not world wide back then, so to speak) so that people could contact me and I could mail them a copy of software that I wrote, both compiled and the source.
I'd cite any software that was reasonable to consider as relevant. If possible, I'd cite a scientific article, where possible. A couple of times, the software want necessarily all that important for the science, but I'd found it so useful that I'd cite it - though that was more to draw attention to it.
I do now wonder if it is a generational thing. Namely, when I was still in academia, there wasn't as much software as there is now. The use of computers was still fairly new. Citing our software tools was a bit more unique and citing COTS software was probably even more rare.
That may have something to do with it. While I still read a lot of papers, I'm completely removed from academia. I suspect I missed something along the way. It has been nearly 30 years - that's eons in the world of computers.
They haven't posted in a couple of years. Instead of calling them out by name, I'll just go ahead and link to the thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521973
At first, I was thinking it couldn't be true - but then I noticed your username. As I mentioned, I've seen you post before and I didn't think you'd be dishonest. So, I figured I'd go investigate.
It is definitely unconventional. Another poster mentioned it violated GNUs guidelines but I doubt that is true. The GNU folks are, shall we say, really big on remaining ethically consistent. If it violated their guidelines, I'm really certain they'd remove it from their site.
I am not sure I like the precedent that it sets, though I am not seeing it copied by other projects.
Like you, I get why they might do it but, now that I know about it, I don't like the idea of it. I'm not irate, or even perturbed really. It absolutely wouldn't stop me from using the software if I needed it.
It does make me curious as to when people stopped listing their tools. I have academic publications with my name on them, so I know you should cite your tools so that others can reproduce your work.
That is the whole reason you cite your tools, reproducability. It absolutely shouldn't be because of academic fame for the creator of the tools. It shouldn't be about the toolmaker at all. You cite tools, and versions of said tools, so that others can reproduce your work and, if they can't, they can see if it isn't reproducible due to part of the tool chain being different.
In fact, that's one of the great reasons for preferring permissability-based software licenses - so that you have permission to share the exact version of the tools you used to do your research. Citing the toolset just to ensure the author gets a higher counted number is less than optimal.
I realize this veers off-topic but I wonder where things went wrong? I finished my dissertation in the early 1990s and haven't published anything since. I took my newly minted doctorate and headed for the private sector. Perhaps someone who remained in academia knows?
I am really curious as to when this changed and why it changed? Begging for citations, for something that should give very little credit, shouldn't be a thing. Worse, the situation should never be that someone feels pressured to do so. How did it even get to this point? What did I miss?