When citing computations performed with PETSc in a publication, plus run the application code with all the options you usually use and the option -citations optionalfilename This will generate a list of bibtex references appropriate for that computation. Otherwise please cite the following:
@Misc{petsc-web-page,
author = {Satish Balay and Shrirang Abhyankar and Mark~F. Adams and Jed Brown and Peter Brune
and Kris Buschelman and Lisandro Dalcin and Victor Eijkhout and William~D. Gropp
and Dinesh Kaushik and Matthew~G. Knepley
and Lois Curfman McInnes and Karl Rupp and Barry~F. Smith
and Stefano Zampini and Hong Zhang},
title = {{PETS}c {W}eb page},
url = {http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc},
howpublished = {\url{http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc}},
year = {2015}
}
@TechReport{petsc-user-ref,
author = {Satish Balay and Shrirang Abhyankar and Mark~F. Adams and Jed Brown and Peter Brune
and Kris Buschelman and Lisandro Dalcin and Victor Eijkhout and William~D. Gropp
and Dinesh Kaushik and Matthew~G. Knepley
and Lois Curfman McInnes and Karl Rupp and Barry~F. Smith
and Stefano Zampini and Hong Zhang},
title = {{PETS}c Users Manual},
institution = {Argonne National Laboratory},
year = 2015,
number = {ANL-95/11 - Revision 3.6},
url = {http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc}
}
@InProceedings{petsc-efficient,
Author = "Satish Balay and William D. Gropp and Lois Curfman McInnes and Barry F. Smith",
Title = "Efficient Management of Parallelism in Object Oriented Numerical Software Libraries",
Booktitle = "Modern Software Tools in Scientific Computing",
Editor = "E. Arge and A. M. Bruaset and H. P. Langtangen",
Pages = "163--202",
Publisher = "Birkh{\"{a}}user Press",
Year = "1997"
}