Handling of Citations inside Debian Science

Citation information should be injected into debian/upstream files.

The files are gathered in a daily cron job either via UpstreamMetadata gatherer or even in the gatherer for some science relevant projects in the gatherer of machine readable information of Blends and is injected into UDD for further use. To make sure that all the information is correct the importer job is doing some verification by creating a BibTeX file and an according LaTeX file which is processed through pdflatex and creates a PDF from all citations attached to Debian packages. This service is currently not intended to be used as some real information to work with but just a proof that the citation information inside debian/upstream files is valid. You can find the resulting files here:

As said above these files are created to prove the validity of the citation information but nothing will stop you from using the files for some other purpose. If you want to create the BibTeX file yourself you can login to alioth and say:

The entries for the table inside the debian.tex file can be obtained via

Potential enhancements for the citations

The Debian Science BoF at DebConf 13 came up with some suggestions to make citations better accessible for your work.

Presenting the citation in HTML rather than PDF

There is a chance to use pandoc to create HTML pages (and there was some volunteer to implement this)

Create a dh_science helper

All debian/upstream files could be installed inside the binary package at for instance

This could just be done by some dh_science helper automatically and it also could add some trigger which creates an according BibTeX file all time a new package containing a citation is installed.