--- title: "Manipulating Citations with cffr" description: > Learn how to modify `cff` objects. output: rmarkdown::html_vignette: toc: true bibliography: REFERENCES.bib link-citations: yes vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{Manipulating Citations with cffr} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} --- ```{r, include = FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", warning = FALSE, message = TRUE ) library(cffr) ``` **cffr** is a tool whose target audience are **R** package developers. The main goal of **cffr** is to create a `CITATION.cff` file using the metadata information of the following files: - Your `DESCRIPTION` file. - If available, the citation information located in `inst/CITATION`. ## What is a `CITATION.cff` file? [Citation File Format (CFF](https://citation-file-format.github.io/)) [@druskat_citation_2021] (v1.2.0) are plain text files with human- and machine-readable citation information for software (and data sets). Code developers can include them in their repositories to let others know how to correctly cite their software. This format is becoming popular within the software citation ecosystem. Recently [GitHub](https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-citation-files), [Zenodo](https://citation-file-format.github.io/#/supported-by-zenodo-) and [Zotero](https://citation-file-format.github.io/#/supported-by-zotero-) have included full support of this citation format [@druskat_stephan_making_2021]. GitHub support is of special interest: ```{r echo=FALSE, out.width="400", fig.align='center', fig.alt="GitHub-link"} knitr::include_graphics("tweet-1.png") ``` *--- Nat Friedman (\@natfriedman) July 27, 2021* See [Customize your repository/About CITATION files](https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-citation-files) for more info. ## Creating a `CITATION.cff` file for my R package With **cffr** creating a `CITATION.cff` file is quite straightforward. You just need to run `cff_write()`: ```{r setup, eval=FALSE} library(cffr) cff_write() # You are done! ``` Under the hood, `cff_write()` performs the following tasks: - It extracts the metadata using `cff_create()`. - Optionally modifies it with `cff_modify()`. - Writes a `CITATION.cff` file. - Validates the result using `cff_validate()`. Congratulations! Now you have a full `CITATION.cff` file for your **R** package. ## Modifying your `CITATION.cff` file You can easily customize the `cff` object (a custom class of **cffr**) using the coercion system provided in the package, as well as making use of the `keys` parameter. We would create a `cff` object using `cff()` (for example purposes only) and we would add or modify contents of it. ### Adding new fields ```{r newfields} newobject <- cff() newobject ``` The valid keys of the [Citation File Format schema version 1.2.0](https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema-guide.md) can be displayed with `cff_schema_keys()`: ```{r validkeys} cff_schema_keys() ``` In this case, we are going to add `url`, `version` and `repository`. We would also overwrite the `title` key. We just need to add those parameters to `cff_modify()`: ```{r modify} modobject <- cff_modify(newobject, url = "https://ropensci.org/", version = "0.0.1", repository = "https://github.com/ropensci/cffr", # If the field is already present, it would be overridden title = "Modifying a 'cff' object" ) modobject # Validate against the schema cff_validate(modobject) ``` ### Persons and references **cffr** provides two functions that convert `person` and `bibentry` objects (see `?person` and `?bibentry`) according to the [Citation File Format schema](https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format/blob/main/schema-guide.md). Following the previous example, we are going to add a new author first. For doing that, we need first to extract the current author of the package and append the coerced person: ```{r includeauthor} # Valid person keys cff_schema_definitions_person() # Create the person chiquito <- person("Gregorio", "Sánchez Fernández", email = "fake@email2.com", comment = c( alias = "Chiquito de la Calzada", city = "Malaga", country = "ES", ORCID = "0000-0000-0000-0001" ) ) chiquito # To cff chiquito_cff <- as_cff_person(chiquito) chiquito_cff # Append to previous authors newauthors <- c(modobject$authors, chiquito_cff) newauthors newauthorobject <- cff_modify(modobject, authors = newauthors) newauthorobject cff_validate(newauthorobject) ``` Now, we may want to add `references` to our data. On the following example, we would add two references, one created with `bibentry()` and another with `citation()`: ```{r parsingcits} # Valid reference keys cff_schema_definitions_refs() # Auto coercion from another R package base_r <- citation("base") bib <- bibentry("Book", title = "This is a book", author = "Lisa Lee", year = 1980, publisher = "McGraw Hill", volume = 2 ) refs <- c(base_r, bib) refs # Now to cff refs_cff <- as_cff(refs) refs_cff ``` Now the process is similar to the example with `person`: we just modify our `cff` object: ```{r references} finalobject <- cff_modify(newauthorobject, references = refs_cff) finalobject cff_validate(finalobject) ``` ### Create your modified `CITATION.cff` file The results can be written with `cff_write()`: ```{r write} # For example tmp <- tempfile(fileext = ".cff") see_res <- cff_write(finalobject, outfile = tmp) cat(readLines(tmp), sep = "\n") ``` And finally we can read our created `CITATION.cff` file using `cff_read()`: ```{r read} reading <- cff_read(tmp) reading ``` Note that `cff_write()` also has the `keys` param, so the workflow can be simplified as: ```{r} allkeys <- list( "url" = "https://ropensci.org/", "version" = "0.0.1", "repository" = "https://github.com/ropensci/cffr", # If the field is already present, it would be overridden title = "Modifying a 'cff' object", authors = newauthors, references = refs_cff ) tmp2 <- tempfile(fileext = ".cff") res <- cff_write(cff(), outfile = tmp2, keys = allkeys) res ``` ```{r include=FALSE} # Clean temps unlink(tmp) unlink(tmp2) ``` ## References