One thing I’m missing on GitHub is support for providing a citation for a journal paper about the software, not the software itself. It’s common to see something like “if you use this code, please cite this paper” in README files.

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.