Cite Bifrost

Bifrost publishes machine-readable citation metadata in CITATION.cff. GitHub uses this file for its Cite this repository action. Bifrost does not currently publish a DOI, so cite it as versioned software and include the full Git commit used for the analysis. A release number alone is insufficient when the run used an unreleased checkout.

Authorship And Project Lineage

The citation uses Bifrost contributors as a collective author. This is intentional:

• Citation authorship records creative and scholarly credit; it is separate from copyright ownership. Brokk, Inc. remains the copyright owner and is listed as the project contact.
• Bifrost is a Rust port and continuation of analyzer architecture, resources, and tests developed in the Brokk Java codebase. The CFF metadata references Brokk so that lineage is machine-readable instead of crediting only the people whose commits appear in the newer Rust repository.
• A Git commit count is not an authorship policy. It omits design, review, testing, documentation, and work ported across repositories, while treating every commit as the same kind of contribution.

The collective author avoids inventing an incomplete or arbitrary list of named authors. If the project later adopts named authorship, define contribution criteria first, ask people how they want their names and ORCIDs represented, and review the ordered list for every release. The Bifrost contributor history and Brokk contributor history remain useful acknowledgements, but neither graph is a complete record of intellectual contribution.

Suggested Citation

Use this human-readable form and replace the placeholders:

Bifrost contributors. Bifrost: Multi-language static analysis for agents, editors, and large repositories, version <version>, commit <full-commit>, <year>. https://github.com/BrokkAi/bifrost

A BibTeX software entry can use:

@software{bifrost_contributors_<year>,
  author  = {{Bifrost contributors}},
  title   = {Bifrost: Multi-language Static Analysis for Agents, Editors, and Large Repositories},
  version = {<version>},
  year    = {<year>},
  url     = {https://github.com/BrokkAi/bifrost},
  note    = {Commit <full-commit>}
}

Get the identifiers from the exact binary and checkout used:

bifrost --version
git -C /path/to/bifrost rev-parse HEAD

If a packaged launcher supplied the binary, record the version printed by that binary and the plugin release or revision separately. Do not substitute the source checkout’s commit when it was not the executable that ran.

Cite The Analysis, Not Only The Engine

Software attribution does not make a result reproducible. Alongside the citation, publish the source repository revision, query and schema version, workspace scope, Bifrost configuration, proof policy, diagnostics, truncation state, and output artifact. Use the analysis manifest as the minimum companion record.

When quoting a result, identify its evidence level. For example: “Bifrost 0.8.5 returned a proven indexed call edge at path:line for query revision abc…, with no execution diagnostics and truncated: false.” Avoid turning that bounded static result into an unqualified runtime or whole-program claim.