# CITATION.cff (Citation File Format)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/citation-cff/  
OnCo record `citation-cff` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

CITATION.cff is a small file in a code repository that says, in a machine-readable way, how to cite the software; GitHub and Zenodo read it to generate citations.

## Summary

The Citation File Format is a plain-text YAML format for software citation metadata (authors, title, version, DOI, licence) described at citation-file-format.github.io; GitHub shows a cite-this-repository button from it and Zenodo uses it when archiving a release (Wikipedia on Zenodo). It is the smallest step towards software being credited like papers, and a missing citation file is a sign a research codebase was never meant to be reused.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: CITATION.cff; Citation File Format; citation file; software citation metadata
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/citation-cff.

## Sources

- Citation File Format: https://citation-file-format.github.io/
- Wikipedia: Zenodo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenodo

## Connected records

- terms: [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Open licences: Apache-2.0, MIT and CC BY 4.0](https://onco.cc/terms/open-licences/), [Reproducibility and negative results](https://onco.cc/terms/reproducibility/), [Zenodo DOIs for data and code](https://onco.cc/terms/zenodo-doi/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/citation-cff.json