This is something that you can do by providing a `preferred-citation` in a CITATION.cff file. This will be rendered on GitHub as the thing to cite. See the schema guide section about this here: https://github.com/citation-file-format/citation-file-format....
Ah, interesting. Thanks! I was experimenting with the "references" key to see if it can do what I want and somehow missed that "preferred-citation" exists. Was this added after the initial GitHub announcement?
The agenda release and docs update came a few days later, yes. I think it might have been in the Gem already, albeit experimentally.
I was a little surprised that wasn't the default usage model, but I followed the instructions and it showed up as expected.
This is because CFF is mainly built to support the software citation principles [1], where it is argued (rightly so, if you ask me) that software is important enough to be cited in its own right.
Also, there will likely be no new paper for each version of software, so if you want to cite the version you have used in your work (e.g. towards reproducibility), the paper may be useless.
There are many reasons why people put this into their READMEs, but it mostly boils down to the fact that paper citations affect various metrics, while citations of a GitHub repo mostly don’t matter.
The citation file format does include a field for providing a list of extended references, but it seems that GitHub doesn’t support that.