Hello,

Our lab used Inkscape extensively in our scientific image analyses, and in our upcoming paper I am required to provide a full citation for Inkscape. I think this is also a great way to promote the use of Free (as in Freedom) software in the academia, where the use of proprietary software is all too common, and not even something people think about.

As part of the citation format, a full author list is required (and at least the first five if the number of authors is greater than five). Other required stuff, like year, version number, etc. is fine, but where can I find this "author list" for Inkscape?

I realise there are so many contributors to Inkscape over the years, but I hope there is a way to figure this out. Thank you so much!

P.S. I did read this past post on the topic, but there wasn't a solution provided.

Hi.

Inkscape - Help - About Inkscape - Authors Tab
Will give you a list of 162 names (at least in my version - Inkscape 0.48+devel r11909).

RGDS Ragnar

Hah! I guess I wasn't much help in that other topic Too bad no one else replied.

My version (0.48.1) shows an alphabetical list of developers. So if you need them listed according to how much or what they contribute, this page might help: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... nformation. Or if nothing else, maybe the Press Relations contacts (shown on that page) could help?

Thanks for the answers!!

OK, so looks like I will have to pick five authors to conform to the journal's citation requirements. I looked at the Contact information wiki page brynn suggested. However, the order of authors still needs to be determined, and is obviously very important in a citation. Any suggestions? Thanks.

I don't know. If any devs are lurking around, maybe one could offer a suggestion. Beyond that, you could try the dev mailing list (http://inkscape.org/mailing_lists.php?lang=en). Oorrr....gosh, I don't know if this would be possible, but is there some way to search things that already cite Inkscape? Then you could see how others have done it. I wish I could be more helpful.

Edit
Or maybe previous versions of Inkscape might list them by level of contribution? Somewhere I've seen something that has someone named as lead developer, but I can't remember where I saw it. You might pick up something by perusing the google+ site (link in my sig). Oh, and also look at Launchpad (Inkscape bug tracker) there's a page for Inkscape Administrators. Also try Launchpad Answers. Ok, here on Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/ it lists 5 devs. Maybe those are the top 5?? Since Sourceforge is where the code resides, I'd say those would be the 5 you need. But I really don't know for sure.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I noticed Wikipedia "cites" the developers of Inkscape as "The Inkscape Team", which is something that conforms to the citation format I need to follow. If I can't figure out the correct order, I will probably use The Inkscape Team as the author, which would include everyone anyway.

Thanks again brynn for your help!

Oh, there you go -- great idea to look at Wikipedia!
You're welcome

Edit
PS -- I was looking for something else just now, and found this current article on inkscape.org (dated Nov 12, 2012, in case it gets moved to archives before you see this). It's about creating and Inkscape Board to guide the most important development decisions. Any of those (using the contact links in the wiki which I already posted a link to) could probably tell you what you need to know.