  Software is a fundamental pillar of modern scientiic research, not only in
computer science, but actually across all elds and disciplines. However, there
is a lack of adequate means to cite and reference software, for many reasons.
An obvious rst reason is software authorship, which can range from a single
developer to a whole team, and can even vary in time. The panorama is even more
complex than that, because many roles can be involved in software development:
software architect, coder, debugger, tester, team manager, and so on. Arguably,
the researchers who have invented the key algorithms underlying the software
can also claim a part of the authorship. And there are many other reasons that
make this issue complex. We provide in this paper a contribution to the ongoing
eeorts to develop proper guidelines and recommendations for software citation,
building upon the internal experience of Inria, the French research institute
for digital sciences. As a central contribution, we make three key
recommendations. (1) We propose a richer taxonomy for software contributions
with a qualitative scale. (2) We claim that it is essential to put the human at
the heart of the evaluation. And (3) we propose to distinguish citation from
reference.
