This is indeed something that needs to be solved. I think the current path in the schol comms community leans towards having contributors (with different roles) as well as authors.
Also, summary authors ("the <project> contributors") is one way to relatively elegantly circumvent this, and something you could do in a CFF file for example (these are being picked up by Zenodo).
Re:Citation File Format
by pwdisswordfish8 on Saturday August 21, 2021 @11:40AM
(#28257864)
When citing collective written works (like conference paper collections), the editors’ names are usually listed. I don’t see why not do the same here: cite the maintainers’ names when citing the whole, and also specific authors when citing particular fragments.
Why not simply cite the original creators? Then if major features changed amongst versions then the key contributors?
Original creators (whose idea the software is) should be first author.
As I understand it, an important point of software citations is to help academic researchers who are (unfortunately) measured by citation metrics. Will whatever tools the bean counters are using connect "the <project> contributors" citations properly to people? I don't see how they could.
I could manually curate a list of the "main authors", which would be much smaller, but I'm not particularly enthusiastic about being the arbiter of when someone's contributions are major enough to become a "main author".
[0]: https://zenodo.org/record/5062209