As the funding for Magma is provided by competitive research grants, it is important for us to be able to present evidence of the impact of the system by providing evidence of citations in the literature. If you use Magma in a non-trivial way in your research then we strongly encourage you to mention this in the text and also to include a citation in the bibliography. If your paper does not include some standard reference for Magma in its bibliography then it is much harder for us to locate it on the web since it will not show up in citation indexes.

The recommended citation is:

Wieb Bosma, John Cannon, and Catherine Playoust, The Magma algebra system. I. The user language, J. Symbolic Comput., 24 (1997), 235–265.

Alternatively, you could cite the Magma Handbook (a PDF copy is included with the Magma distribution):

W. Bosma, J. J. Cannon, C. Fieker, A. Steel (eds.), Handbook of Magma functions, Edition 2.16 (2010), 5017 pages.

If using this second form, you should replace the last portion with the appropriate details for the version of the Handbook that corresponds to the version of Magma used in your application.

---

@article {MR1484478,
    AUTHOR = {Bosma, Wieb and Cannon, John and Playoust, Catherine},
     TITLE = {The {M}agma algebra system. {I}. {T}he user language},
      NOTE = {Computational algebra and number theory (London, 1993)},
   JOURNAL = {J. Symbolic Comput.},
  FJOURNAL = {Journal of Symbolic Computation},
    VOLUME = {24},
      YEAR = {1997},
    NUMBER = {3-4},
     PAGES = {235--265},
      ISSN = {0747-7171},
   MRCLASS = {68Q40},
  MRNUMBER = {MR1484478},
       DOI = {10.1006/jsco.1996.0125},
       URL = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jsco.1996.0125},
}