How to cite QL?

[mvdv]

Hi,

I've become aware of QL and would like to know how to cite QL, i.e. how
authorship is established and acknowledged.  I should state up front that at
the moment I'm definitely in the class of user.  My programming skills are
largely self taught and I don't think I'm sufficiently skilled to make
contributions at the moment - I think you'd spend more time rewriting the
code than it would take to start from scratch :)

Looking at the QL pages I couldn't see any guidelines for referencing QL.
This seems trivial, but is important if the library is to be used and cited
in research - commercial and academic.
I've included a couple of LaTeX BibTeX possibilities below.  
At the moment the documentation/manual publication will probably just be the
doxygen generated documentation?

I think there  are three 'publications' to consider:
- The QuantLib library; source and binaries
- The QuantLib manual/documentation
- The QuantLib home page

Some issues are: What does the group want/request cited? Is citing the
library and/or manual and/or home page in published work a condition of the
license?
I should point out that I am thinking of literary publications, i.e. I don't
think this would lead to the BSD license problem - described at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
But I'm not a lawyer and maybe there is no difference between an article and
a piece of software that uses QL?

Perhaps a "Referencing QL" Link could be placed on the LHS 'menu' of the
homepage, and give people a choice of which one of the citation formats they
wish to use?  Although it might be better just to provide one prefered
format for each of the library, manual, and homepage?

Cheers
Mark

PS I got the content of the 'full' BibTeX file entries from,
Working with BibTEX, JE Shepherd, March 24, 2001

The QL homepage:

@MISC{QLhome-Misc,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {The QuantLib Home Page: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    howpublished = {http://www.quantlib.org},
    month = oct,
    year = 1984,
    note = {TheOrganisation},
}

@UNPUBLISHED{QLhome-Unpublished,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {The QuantLib Home Page: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    month = {},
    year = {2003},
    note = {TheOrganisation or http://www.quantlib.org},
}

The QL documentation/manual:

@MANUAL{QLman-Manual,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {User's Manual for QuantLib: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    address = {http://www.quantlib.org},
    edition = {0.3.1 beta},
    month = {},
    year = {1986},
    note = {TheOrganisation},
    year = {2003}
}

@MISC{QLman-Misc,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {User's Manual for QuantLib: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    howpublished = {http://www.quantlib.org},
    month = {},
    year = {2003},
    note = {TheOrganisation},
}

@TECHREPORT{QLman-TechReport,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {User's Manual for QuantLib: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    institution = {TheOrganisation},
    type = {User's Manual},
    number = {0.3.1 beta},
    address = {http://www.quantlib.org},
    month = {},
    year = {2003},
    note = {},
}

@UNPUBLISHED{QLman-Unpublished,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {User's Manual for QuantLib: An Open Source Framework for
Quantitative Finance},
    month = {},
    year = {2003},
    note = {TheOrganisation or http://www.quantlib.org},
}

The QL library:

@MISC{QLlib-Misc,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {The QuatLib Library: An Open Source Framework for Quantitative
Finance},
    howpublished = {http://www.quantlib.org},
    month = oct,
    year = 1984,
    note = {TheOrganisation},
}

@UNPUBLISHED{QLlib-Unpublished,
    author = {WhoIsTheAuthor},
    title = {The QuatLib Library: An Open Source Framework for Quantitative
Finance},    month = {},
    year = {2003},
    note = {TheOrganisation},
}

[Niels Elken Sønderby]

Hi Mark and others

> Looking at the QL pages I couldn't see any guidelines for referencing QL.
> This seems trivial, but is important if the library is to be used and
cited
> in research - commercial and academic.
> I've included a couple of LaTeX BibTeX possibilities below.

I haven't put much thought into it, but in my master thesis I cite QuantLib
like this below. (The point being, that then someone interested can find the
other things of interest from there.)

@MISC{Ame2003,
  author =       "Ferdinando Ametrano and Luigi Ballabio",
  title =        "QuantLib - a free/open-source library for quantitative
finance",
  year =         "2003",
  URL =         "http://quantlib.org/",
}

I figured Ametrano = Project Manager, Ballabio = Library Designer, so I put
those two, although to be fair I guess there should be an "et al".

Cheers... Niels

[Luigi Ballabio-2]

At 11:49 AM +0200 5/17/03, Niels Elken Sønderby wrote:

>  > Looking at the QL pages I couldn't see any guidelines for referencing QL.
>>  This seems trivial, but is important if the library is to be used and
>cited
>>  in research - commercial and academic.
>>  I've included a couple of LaTeX BibTeX possibilities below.
>
>I haven't put much thought into it, but in my master thesis I cite QuantLib
>like this below. (The point being, that then someone interested can find the
>other things of interest from there.)
>
>@MISC{Ame2003,
>   author =       "Ferdinando Ametrano and Luigi Ballabio",
>   title =        "QuantLib - a free/open-source library for quantitative
>finance",
>   year =         "2003",
>   URL =         "http://quantlib.org/",
>}
>
>I figured Ametrano = Project Manager, Ballabio = Library Designer, so I put
>those two, although to be fair I guess there should be an "et al".

There should be indeed :)
You can find the full author list at http://quantlib.org/html/group.html

As for the way to cite QuantLib, the above (either with "user manual"
added or not) looks fine to me. I can't speak for Nando, but he's
probably busy trying to figure out what this BibTeX thing is, so it
will take a while ;-)

Mark is right though, at some point we should single out and give an
officiality status to some kind of documentation...

Later,
        Luigi

[Ferdinando M. Ametrano-2]

>As for the way to cite QuantLib, the above (either with "user manual"
>added or not) looks fine to me. I can't speak for Nando, but he's probably
>busy trying to figure out what this BibTeX thing is, so it will take a
>while ;-)
sorry, buddy, this week-end I was too busy with Springsteen in Barcelona,
and gladly trust you for BibTeX ...

It's ok for me too (with the "et al." part). We'll try to settle on an
official way to quote QuantLib for the next release

------------
ciao -- Nando