The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

Software development has become an essential part of every sub-field of astronomy. Because of that, software citation is crucial for crediting earlier work, motivating funding, and encouraging reproducible and collaborative science. While there exists a well-developed ecosystem of tools and services to assist with citations to traditional publications, such as ADS/SciX, this infrastructure does not work as well for software citation. Furthermore, the community lacks a standardized citation practice for astronomy software. This has led to disparate software citation practices that are difficult to reconcile, increasing the risk of uncredited software and results that cannot be reproduced.

We are addressing this challenge by (i) facilitating the standardization of software citation practices throughout the astronomy community, and (ii) developing a leading class tool to implement these standards: The Software Citation Station (version 1 of which has been used in 59 papers and counting, and is publicly available at https://www.tomwagg.com/software-citation-station/). To accomplish (i), we will be hosting a workshop and hackathon in early 2026, which will bring together software citation experts across the field to align on a definitive set of best practices. These recommendations will help define the tools required by our community, directly informing (ii): our goal of making The Software Citation Station a comprehensive resource for software citation in astronomy.

We intend to make The Software Citation Station a one-stop-shop for software citation resources by integrating it with other astronomy platforms (e.g., ADS, ArXiv, ASCL), and continuing to add features such as dependency support and .cff handling. By doing so, we aim to enable consistent adoption of best practices, ensuring that astronomy software is properly recognized and that astronomy research is widely reproducible.