Citation

OSCR helps make research code citable. Cite the work first (the paper and its authors' code), and cite the registry as well when you used it to find, read or check them.

Cite the source first

A paper is cited by its DOI, as its journal says. A paper's page on OSCR gives ready formats (an APA-like text, BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON) in its Cite section, each with a Copy button.

The authors' code

Cite the code as its authors ask: their repository's CITATION.cff when there is one (the Repositories section says so), or its archive's DOI (a Zenodo release, for instance). For a git repository, give the commit (the page shows the one that was verified) and, when Software Heritage has archived it, its permanent identifier.

A tracing map

A map validated by an author has a DOI: cite it when you mean "this paper's code, as its author confirmed it". Its creators are the validating author and the platform; the paper's page gives its citation once it has one. A map proposed by the machine has no DOI; for it, cite the paper's page with the date you read it.

A paper's record

The record of a paper changes as its code is checked again or corrected; its Versions section lists each change. To cite what you read, give the page's address and the date:

OSCR. Record of <the paper's DOI>. https://openscicode.org/paper/<its identifier>/ (read on <date>).

The registry

The OSCR contributors (2026). OSCR: Open Scientific Code Registry. Catalogue of 13 November 2026, 10:21 UTC. https://openscicode.org/

The About page gives the same in BibTeX.

The datasets

Cite the scripts' dataset by its address and the revision you used (each upload is a commit of the dataset's repository):

The OSCR contributors (2026). OpenScientificCodeRegistry/Database [Data set]. Hugging Face. https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenScientificCodeRegistry/Database (revision <commit>).

A script taken from it is still its authors' work: cite them, and keep the licence its manifest names.

The software

The harvester, the site and its Worker are open source (Apache-2.0). The repository's CITATION.cff gives the software's citation; GitHub turns it into APA and BibTeX with its "Cite this repository" button.