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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 peop
by abdullahkhalids 4y ago
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
- jrochkind1 4y agoOnce 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.