Add a CITATION.cff to make citing DRF in academic work easier

[emmanuelnyandukagarabi]

Hi maintainers,

I'm building a research software project (a Django-based web app for exploring protein domain classifications: DPCexplorer) on top of DRF, and it's been a genuinely great tool to work with.

I'm currently writing up the project for an academic paper, and I ran into the fact that DRF has no standard way to be cited, similar to the situation Django itself has (referenced in code.djangoproject.com/ticket/15379). A CITATION.cff file would fix that: GitHub reads it natively and shows a "Cite this repository" button, which is a small addition but genuinely helps every researcher who depends on DRF and needs to reference it properly.

If it's useful, I'd be happy to open a PR with a draft CITATION.cff for the maintainers to review and adjust author/metadata fields as needed.

As a further step (lower priority, since it involves an ongoing workflow commitment rather than a one-time file), connecting the repository to Zenodo would let releases get archived with a concept DOI and per-version DOIs. That would align DRF with the FAIR Principles for Research Software, which is becoming more expected for the tools cited in scientific software papers.
Totally understand if that's a bigger ask than the maintainers want to take on right now, but wanted to flag it.

Thanks again for the framework; it's a pleasure to build on.

[browniebroke]

Hey, thanks for the idea. I know very little about the academic world, so I might need to do a bit of research to learn more.

My initial reaction is that the Django ticket you linked has been fixed without adding a CITATION.cff and the rationale was (if I follow) that there was a less intrusive format with the APA style... Did I get this right? I also appreciate this is an old ticket and that the standard bodies may have evolved since then...

I was going to ask for an example but then realised that projects more used in data science probably have one, and it was indeed easy to find some examples (Pandas cff, Numpy bib, Matplotlib cff and bib). Interesting how this is fragmented, the first 3 projects I could think of either picked one, another or both format.