Please cite the papers for the tools you're using. Impact is main thing scientists are judged for in job and grant applications, and that is usually measured using the number of citations.

If you'd stop citing papers for tools you'd stop academic software development.

This is amazingly field dependent. I am from a field where you only cite the most significant tools you use (Machine Learning). E.g. "We implemented this with a neural network build with TensorFlow (cite). We augmented the data using skew tranforms from Augumentor.jl"

But the convention of other fields is to recursively cite all software that is loaded by your experimental code. And is strictly required by their journals.

and I am not one to tell other fields what their conventions should be. Especially not when they give more credit.

There seems to be a bit of an overlap with software that is written by academics and asking for citation.

I am vaguely remembering one of the awk* variants (or something like that) does something similar every time you have to run it, unless ran with some command-line switch (*may not have been awk).

you're thinking of GNU parallel :) That one always prints a citation notice https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/tree/doc/cita...

Yes, that's it. One of those "back of the cupboard" utilities I always need to re-read the manual for whenever I need it.

Yeah, I’d only cite it if it was a critical part of the methodology for a particular paper, or in a didactic field. It’s good for them to have a citable paper, though.