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.

2 Responses to “How to Cite a Blog: Citation style”

1. Style » How to Cite a Blog: Citation style says:

   10/12/2007 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 … [...]

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2. Gunther Eysenbach says:

   3/14/2008 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 http://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 http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/.

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