How to Cite a Blog: Citation style
The NLM style guide now has a special format for citing blogs. Beyond how cool it is that blogs are considered authoritative enough to warrant their own formal citation style, the new “general format for a reference to a blog on the Internet” is remarkably sensitive to the temporal nature of the web. For example, this entry could be cited as:
Bäck E. Books Blog [Internet]. New York: Elliott Bäck. 2004 Nov - [cited 2007 Oct 12]. Available from: books.elliottback.com/?p=147
They strongly recommend including the word “blog” in the title if it is not already there to indicate that the citation refers to a blog. Also interesting is the date of publication, which is given as the date of the first post that can be found in the archives.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is tagged with nlm style guide, formal citation, citation style, temporal nature, e books, internet new, date of publication, bk, blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on October 12th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
[…] Samantha wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe NLM style guide now has a special format for citing blogs. Beyond how cool it is that blogs are considered authoritative enough to warrant their own formal citation style, the new “general format for a reference to a blog on the … […]
on March 14th, 2008 at 3:55 am
The problem with just citing the “live URL” is that the URL may go 404 some time in the future, or the blogger may change/edit his entry.
To cite a blog (or any kind of webmaterial, for that matter), use WebCite, i.e. the web archiving form at www.webcitation.org, and then add the WebCite link to the citation (Archived at….). This takes a snapshot of the cited blog and preserves it permanently in the Internet archive.
Also, as a blogger, you should add a link (e.g. “WebCite this”) to the WebCite archiving form, so that people know how to cite the blog. For example, I did this on my blog at gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/.