Next step: Citation data

[github-actions]

It is likely that your CITATION.cff currently doesn't pass validation. The error messages you get from the cffconvert GitHub Action are unfortunately a bit cryptic, but doing the following helps:

• Check if the given-name and family-name keys need updating. If your family name has a name particle like von or van or de, use the name-particle key; if your name has a suffix like Sr or IV, use name-suffix. For details, refer to the schema description: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format
• Update the value of the orcid key. If you do not have an orcid yet, you can get one here https://orcid.org/.
• Add more authors if needed
• Update date-released using the YYYY-MM-DD format.
• Update the doi key with the conceptDOI for your repository (see https://help.zenodo.org for more information on what a conceptDOI is). If your project doesn't have a DOI yet, you can use the string 10.0000/FIXME to pass validation.
• Verify that the keywords array accurately describes your project.

Once you do all the steps above, the cffconvert workflow will tell you what content it expected to see in .zenodo.json. Copy-paste from the GitHub Action log into a new file .zenodo.json. Afterwards, the cffconvert GitHub Action should be green.

To help you keep the citation metadata up to date and synchronized, the cffconvert GitHub Action checks the following 6 aspects:

1. Whether your repository includes a CITATION.cff file.

   By including this file, authors of the software can receive credit for the work they put in.

2. Whether your CITATION.cff is valid YAML.

   Visit http://www.yamllint.com/ to see if the contents of your CITATION.cff are valid YAML.

3. Whether your CITATION.cff adheres to the schema (as listed in the CITATION.cff file itself under key cff-version).

   The Citation File Format schema can be found here, along with an explanation of all the keys. You're advised to use the latest available schema version.

4. Whether your repository includes a .zenodo.json file.

   With this file, you can control what metadata should be associated with any future releases of your software on Zenodo: things like the author names, along with their affiliations and their ORCIDs, the license under which the software has been released, as well as the name of your software and a short description. If your repository doesn't have a .zenodo.json file, Zenodo will take a somewhat crude guess to assign these metadata.

   The cffconvert GitHub action will tell you what it expects to find in .zenodo.json, just copy and paste it to a new file named .zenodo.json. The suggested text ignores CITATION.cff's version, commit, and date-released. cffconvert considers these keys suspect in the sense that they are often out of date, and there is little purpose to telling Zenodo about these properties: Zenodo already knows.

5. Whether .zenodo.json is valid JSON.

   Currently unimplemented, but you can check for yourself on https://jsonlint.com/.

6. Whether CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json contain equivalent data.

   This final check verifies that the two files are in sync. The check ignores CITATION.cff's version, commit, and date-released.