The development of production level scientific software, such as the components of the Einstein Toolkit, represents the academic output of researchers who bring together skills in formulations, algorithms and software engineering as well as substantial domain knowledge. The scientific contributions of such researchers should be acknowledged and respected on a par with those whose expertise lie solely in theory or experiment. Further, most contributions to the Einstein Toolkit have been provided by early stage researchers — graduate students, postdocs and young assistant professors, where proper and appropriate citation of their contributions is crucial for furthering academic careers.
The primary way to cite the Einstein Toolkit is now by the DOI assigned to the current release. This method cites the software and assigns credit to the many contributors over the years.
A secondary way to cite the toolkit is through the publication (key Loffler:2011ay in the Einstein Toolkit BibTeX file): Frank Löffler, Joshua Faber, Eloisa Bentivegna, Tanja Bode, Peter Diener, Roland Haas, Ian Hinder, Bruno C. Mundim, Christian D. Ott, Erik Schnetter, Gabrielle Allen, Manuela Campanelli, and Pablo Laguna. The Einstein Toolkit: A Community Computational Infrastructure for Relativistic Astrophysics. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 29(11):115001, 2012. (doi:10.1088/0264-9381/29/11/115001)
The current guidelines for citation of the Einstein Toolkit are:Authors whose published work is derived from results obtained using the Einstein Toolkit are requested to individually cite publications for identified key software components used to obtain those results. These publications, that are listed below, include details of e.g. the equations, algorithm, and verification of components. Obviously, citations should only be given for components that were actually used.