Using Provenance for Generating Automatic Citations

When computational experiments include only datasets, they could be shared through the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) which point to these resources. However, experiments seldom include only datasets, but most often also include software, execution results, provenance, and other associated documentation. The Research Object has recently emerged as a comprehensive and systematic method for aggregation and identification of diverse elements of computational experiments. While an entire Research Object may be citable using a URI or a DOI, it is often desirable to cite specific sub-components of a research object to help identify, authorize, date, and retrieve the published sub-components of these objects. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically generate citations for sub-components of research objects by using the object's recorded provenance traces. The generated citations can be used "as is" or taken as suggestions that can be grouped and combined to produce higher level citations.