Dear all,

It has become a convention that each tool/wrapper in
Galaxy includes citation instructions in their help text
(although not all the tools do this - I think they should).

It occurred to me this could be formalised, with explicit
markup in the tool XML file, embedding the citation
(at very least with an identifier like the DOI or ISBN,
there is probably a good existing XML standard
that could be followed).

Then, Galaxy would be able to automatically pull out
a list of citations the tool authors have requested be
cited, removing duplicates (e.g. matching DOI), from
a history or a workflow.

The aim of this is (a) to make it easier to write up your
methods by supplying all the references, and (b) to help
ensure tool authors get the acknowledgement they
deserve.

Does this sound like a good idea?