In my case, the answer is definitely yes. There are a couple of arguments relevant to issues I’m writing on, that as far as I can tell, have only been made on blogs. I actually really want to cite them (mostly as a foil to eventually disagree with, but that’s somewhat beside the point). But I’m not really sure how exactly to do so, and am definitely a little concerned that it may seem unprofessional to be citing blog posts, and that others won’t take them seriously because they’re not “proper” publications.

Hmm, looking at the actual actual blog post in question, I wonder if this guy isn’t taking himself a little too seriously.

Quite right. I had no intention of commenting on the humanities, as I know nothing about how that system works, though I am happy to learn.

In that sense of discovery, I wonder what sort of credentialing you might need before citing a blog (if any). Would you only cite a blog of a learned colleague that you know well? Would you cite someone you don’t, personally, know, but who has a PhD and a good reputation? Would a grad student in a reputable program be worthy? What about a really smart undergrad? Or a gifted high school student?

I don’t have a PhD (thus you can disregard what I say for that reason alone, if you choose), so I have no love for The System and how respect is doled out… but I think there is a lower limit on credibility when making a reasonable citation… it probably isn’t level of education, but I have trouble believing something that hasn’t been peer reviewed is ever going to crest that threshold.

To try and rephrase more simply… if someone presented an argument you disagreed with, what kind of blog post cite would convince you that you had it wrong? Can someone provide me with examples?

For me, I have trouble imagining a scenario that would warrant it. Stating a hypothesis publicly, or in private, is not impressive to me and does not deserve a citation in my view. Hypotheses are really a rather minor part of the scientific method… it’s ridiculously easy to come up with confounds/questions. We could spitball probably a dozen (at the very least) of those for any paper you wanted to pick. What matters is not the question per se, but the way you go about trying to address it. Raising the question may or may not be acknowledgment worthy… but we definitely don’t get into citation or authorship range until we start talking about experimental design or actual evidence; not just theories.

I don’t have any problem citing blogs if they do some actual work… a mini meta analysis, perhaps? However I have yet to see an example of blog work that deserves such honors.

It isn’t clear to me whether the authors knew of Gelman’s post in advance. If they didn’t, guess he’s not as famous as he thinks. But if they did, well, I would have noted that in print.

Is some of the reluctance to cite blog posts a fear that the audience will think one is immature, like citing pop song lyrics or something? Because that really has nothing to do with the quality of one’s research or argument. The test is relevance, with a bias towards more citations when in doubt.

I wondered because the material I quoted was written in a spontaneous and unrevised way quite unlike this academic’s reviewed and formal work. The spontaneity was partly why I wanted to use it, although of course the substance was also important to my argument.

I actually did wonder if I should perhaps ask the person first, but in the end decided against doing so, because I figured that as a professional writer he or she did understand what publication invites and entails.

In any case, the question here is acknowledgement. The most common CC license requires attribution.

It seems natural but not necessarily fair to me to judge the importance – not quality – of an individual by some sort of cite-ranking system. And people do that.

Credit is important because it’s the currency in which discovery is rewarded.

This seems like an anti-scientific setup. Scientific discovery is supposed to be its own reward, rather than a tool for self-advancement. The expected problems follow: prevalence of academic self-advertising, ubiquitous academic politics, and ultimately, outright fraud.