Citation

OSCR exists to make research code citable. Cite the work first — the paper and its authors' code — and the registry 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 without a DOI — proposed by the machine — is not meant to be cited; 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 29 September 2026, 19:57 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.