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Comment by andreyk | Hacker News Reader

FYI, the actual title is "Nobody cares about your blog!" - pretty big difference from what is shown on HN

"The title of my blog today is a quotation from an email I received yesterday from Noemi De Santis of RECEPTIO, the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition."

It's all about how an academic plagiarized from the blog of this person, and then the academic's secretary completely dismissed it with statements such as - "I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!"

Ironically, a long blog post I wrote in 2015 has over 50 citations (more than most of my papers as an academic, amusingly) according to Google Scholar, so clearly others don't feel the same.

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Plagiarism is still plagiarism, ie word theft.

Perhaps the automatic plagiarism detection used (if used) didn’t include blogs in its corpus, so it wasn’t flagged.

But still the author should have known that unattributed copying is word theft.

Both undergrads and postgrads are taught this on week 1. Professional/career academics are expected to abide by this as well.

FWIW, I've run into this with preprints. I had a paper up on a preprint server, and it was under review for a while. In the meantime, I became aware of another paper that pretty clearly used my paper and an earlier closely related one (to the point that some of the language was the same), passing it off as original. When this came up, their response was pretty similar to that in the OP here: things not formally peer reviewed "don't count" and essentially don't exist (and presumably are fair game to plagiarize?).

The paper was eventually published and there's a paper trail, but I wonder how it will all play out.

It feels a little like a wild west to me.

Half of academics are thiefs, sending the honest ones to drive taxis. Thats how we got here..

My blog has been cited in scientific papers, at least twice:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/search_result?query=majid.info...

How does one cite a blog in a publication? And how do you track it on Google scholar? Quite curious because this is the first time hearing about this - and as an academic it is quite interesting.

Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?

> How does one cite a blog in a publication?

I would make a BibTeX @misc entry with the author, title, and URL. Similar example without even a URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Qiskit/qiskit/master/Qiski.... Here's how that shows up in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=82533882547072366...

Are you not allowed to cite websites in academic papers?

You are definitely allowed, it's just generally less common than citing other academic papers.

You can cite anything whose veracity or authority can be established in some way.

Websites are easy as per that criteria.

The one I find annoying is when people cite like this. According to XYZ [1].... It establishes where the idea comes from, but sometimes lacks details that are needed to reconstruct the idea.

[1] Personal correspondence

Once i was looking for a paper, to construct a list of interesting sources for a professor I was working for.

It was a paper on a very relevant topic that would really be of interest. It had been cited in a dozen different papers, or so. But I could not find the cited paper anywhere!

I realized I could find the author of the cited paper, and just email them. They said "Oh, that was a conference presentation, it was never published as a paper anywhere, only presented orally at the conference."

Fine. Except... most of these citations didn't cite it as a conference presentation. Most of the citers, I am pretty sure were not at that conference. They just copy and pasted the citation from other papers, thinking the same as me, oh, that seems a useful cite. The first couple times it was cited, it might have actually been cited as a conference presentation at a particular conference on a particular date, but that wound up omitted from future copy pastes.

I don't think this was a particularly unusual occurence. Many citations are... unreliable.

A citation to something with an actual URL is pretty good.

You certainly should always acknowledge prior work, whatever the format even if it's just some scribbles on a napkin. If it doesn't qualify for a citation there are also acknowledgments sections.

>How does one cite a blog in a publication

Depends on the publication and the style guide they use. The ones I’m most familiar with are MLA & APA and they both have formats for how they want blogs cited.

I’m not sure how a blog would make the leap into being indexed as part of Google scholar though, unless it was first cited in a more traditional academic paper that fell into their domain.

I did a little bit of poking around on Google Scholar, and while it shows me that I have a few dozen posts cited in academic papers, none of those posts show up as their own entry in the results.

Can be cited in various ways. See here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=a+br...

Google scholar tracks citations by itself in some mysterious way, I have not contributed to that at all.

At my school (bsc. applied computer science at fi.muni.cz about 13 years ago), we had a special course[1] where you learned that you need to cite anything important which you haven't come up with yourself and at the same time it's not trivial knowledge. Otherwise, you are basically deceiving readers (people will assume that you come up with something which you actually didn't) and you lower value/impact you make with your work (people can't follow through the sources). We were even asked to cite help menu or manual of an application as an exercise. Using google one can find similar guidelines about blogs in particular[2].

I understand it would look bad if your publication is citing only few blogs, but in such case the actual problem is that you need find existing publications or books in your area as well. Deciding that you won't cite a blog while you are using it for your work is not a solution to that.

I haven't used google scholar, but is the problem with limited knowledge of the tool that one don't know how to do it? Or is the tool itself limited? This makes me wonder whether the tools which doesn't easily allow one to track citations properly are part of the problem. This was definitely not a problem with bibtex[3]. Either way, that is not an excuse to basically commit an academic fraud.

[1] https://is.muni.cz/predmet/fi/VB000?lang=en [2] https://www.research-integrity.admin.cam.ac.uk/research-inte... [3] https://jonas-moennig.de/how-to-cite-a-website-with-bibtex/

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