Speaking of all of this technical stuff, there is a very cool post about academic citations at The Immanent Frame. They have added a new feature to their blog that provides a drop-down list of standard ways of citing that particular blog entry – MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. It’s a very convenient way of getting the correct citation information for a blog post (if, that is, a blog post is something that you should or could cite – I have a feeling the answer to that depends on your discipline).
A side question: has anyone cited a blog in an academic paper? What was the context and the reaction?
About the author:
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.
I cited several blogs in my Th.M. thesis (An Articulation and Evaluation of an Emerging Church Ecclesiology, 2008). It was accepted well–the only issue was how to handle the large number spelling, grammar, and usage errors (typical for the blog genre). This issue was handled with a footnote at the first error, noting that blog posts were copied directly from the web and errors were original.
Thanks, Laura – I can see blog posts being very relevant for that thesis. Did you use blogs from people who also published in more traditional media, too (e.g. Tony Jones), and did you draw any conclusions about the relationship between their blog posts and their formal publications? A while back, a journalist (I think it was Malcolm Gladwell, but I can’t find the source) commented that many journalists viewed their personal blogs as less important than their magazine or newspaper writing and less reflective of their considered opinions, yet their blogs were often viewed by readers as “truer” to the journalists’ real beliefs.
BTW, the academic citations I mentioned in the original post were produced by a WordPress plug-in developed by Julie Meloni, Jeremy Douglass, and Christy Dena.