Citing blogs

I’ve certainly seen frequent formal citations to “unpublished,” or “personal communication,” or to a talk rather than a journal article. I don’t see why blogs should be any different, especially since there is a record that the reader can actually go and retrieve. I would vote for an ordinary citation, if the content of the blog post was really germane.

Why is giving credit and getting credit such an important part of academic activity anyway? Science is supposed to be about understanding things, not about who said it first.

Credit is important because it’s the currency in which discovery is rewarded. We’re currently working (as we have been more or less for centuries) under the assumption that giving people this kind of reward is a cost-effective way of encouraging them to produce more knowledge and understanding. Michael Strevens (NYU) has some papers arguing that this is an efficient mechanism – even though it is hard to see why priority should be such a big deal in the abstract.

Not only about people’s careers, but also about the basic accumulation of knowledge. It may be useful to later researchers to know the intellectual history of a line of argument.

And to the second comment above, I do not think the burden is to “scour the Internet” to make sure one’s idea has not been mentioned somewhere. I think the burden is that if someone actually did see your argument, and then build on it, he or she is obligated to reference the source. The same logic applies to publications. Sometimes a previous published item has already raised a similar point, and the researcher is honestly unaware of it. That is sure to happen at times, given the fragmentation of the literature, not all of which is indexed centrally even in today’s on-line world. But if you know of a prior relevant argument, cite it, regardless of the source.

I really don’t think Gelman’s deserves credit for his ‘insight’. It’s not really a difficult leap to make. If you see any study saying that X is associated with Y and considering the hypothesis that X may cause Y, anyone with a basic understanding of statistical reasoning will automatically wonder whether this due to confounding rather than a causal effect.

Contributions need to reach a certain standard before they’re creditable. I don’t think you can reasonably claim credit for ideas that are obvious to anyone with a moderate understanding of the topic area. Maybe you deserve credit if you suggest a specific confounder which accounts for a large proportion of the association, and a specific mechanism which explains the reason for the relationship between the three variables. But saying it could be counfounding, and then giving a list of possible confounders and tagging on an etc doesn’t cut it.

Well, I should add that the one citation to Fruits & Votes actually demonstrated the mechanism in question.

Blog entries can do more than “hypothesis without testing.” However, I am not prepared to concede that a hypothesis (even without testing) is unworthy of citation just because it appeared on a blog, or in a hallway conversation.

It seems to me that there are fair numbers of publications that propose hypotheses but do not test (perhaps a conceptual piece, or the data simply are not yet available). Are such publications therefore not cite-worthy?

I suppose worthlessness is in the eyes of the beholder.

Blog entries can do more than “hypothesis without testing.” However, I am not prepared to concede that a hypothesis (even without testing) is unworthy of citation just because it appeared on a blog, or in a hallway conversation.

To me, at most it’s “acknowledgment” worthy in most cases I can envision. If I’m standing by my poster at a meeting, and somebody suggests something that turns out to be true with further examination then I would certainly note their contribution in the ackowledgments… but it falls short of authorship and a citation of a personal communication in scientific literature seems unorthodox at the very least.

However, one example of “more than a hypothesis” that I can think of would be a science blogger saying “I wonder if it’s this” and then laying out a complete or close to complete experimental protocol to answer said question. I could see how that’s worthy of a cite, though I would probably contact the blogger and see if they wanted a larger conceptual role as a coauthor if I planned to take up their proposal.

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.

I think that blog posts, if really an original idea or theory or whatever, should absolutely be given proper academic citation. If someone jacked an idea that I brought up on a blog and used it for an academic paper without citing me, I would be really pissed off. I would be really pissed if someone stole one of my ideas from a hallway discussion and used it for one of their papers. This problem is one of the reason that I’ve held back from discussing my research area on my blog.

Richard: “My understanding is also that anything you write in a blog is public domain. Am I wrong?” Yeah, you are. Standard copyright law applies. When it’s set down in a lasting medium, which has been tested and found to include HTML, it’s yours with all the usual rights unless you explicitly waive them. For an example of such a waiver, see the bottom of the page at Boing Boing with the Creative Commons declaration and link to the specific terms Cory et al use. If there’s nothing like that, the contents of a web page are precisely as protected as they would be in other media.

Copyright only applies to the words in which ideas are expressed. Ideas are in the public domain.

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

If a blog post was relevant to a paper of mine, and I was aware of it, I would cite it happily. The point is to make it easy for the reader to find the material, in case they want to check my honesty or respond in print to me. The fact that lots of people cite a blog post will not (by itself) make tenure committees give them weight in tenure battles. It is not as though my citing a blog post cheapens or dilutes the citations to peer-reviewed work, any more than citing newspapers or hallway conversations does. The reader can easily figure out which sources are really fundamental to the paper, and which are lit review/acknowledgements of similar projects. That’s like saying “good morning” to someone you pass in the hallway “here we both are, in the same issue-space.”

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.

j.w. hamner your remarks probably apply better to scientific disciplines than to the humanities where ‘actual work’ is done on blogs with pleasing regularity.

Well, my field is English Literature. When I cite for historical facts I guess I depend on the established authority of the person I’m citing to some extent. But even there the existence of a PhD or not will not have much influence on whether I will accept one interpretation of historical events over another.
But good literary criticism almost by definition speaks for itself and no further credentialling or underwriting is required.

“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?”

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.