Occasionally we get emails from people who would like to cite our blog posts. Usually, these requests are framed as ‘is this going to be published in a journal?’. It’s no surprise that people are more comfortable citing the traditional academic literature. But researchers are increasingly citing blog posts. Indeed, some of our blog posts have been cited in published academic literature.

There are plenty of guides out there for citing blog posts. You may like to refer to them for specific formatting styles. Cite This For Me is a useful tool for generating references in a variety of styles. Here I’d like to provide a few specific recommendations for citing posts from this blog.

1. Cite the author

Our blog posts are written by lots of different authors, not by ‘the blog’. The author’s name – assuming they have not claimed anonymity – will appear at the top of the blog post. Let’s take a recent example. To start with, your citation should look something like:

Watson, S. (2017). Variations in NHS admissions at a glance. The Academic Health Economists’ Blog. Available at: https://aheblog.com/2017/01/25/variations-in-nhs-admissions-at-a-glance/ [Accessed 8 Mar. 2017].

2. Use our ISSN

As of this week, the blog now has its own International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). This number uniquely identifies and distinguishes the blog. Our ISSN is 2514-3441. You can find it at the bottom of the sidebar and on our About page. So your citation could become:

Watson, S. (2017). Variations in NHS admissions at a glance. The Academic Health Economists’ Blog (ISSN 2514-3441). Available at: https://aheblog.com/2017/01/25/variations-in-nhs-admissions-at-a-glance/ [Accessed 8 Mar. 2017].

3. Use WebCite

Unlike journal articles, websites can change. One of our authors could (in principle) completely change the content of their blog post after publishing it. More importantly, it is possible that our URLs may change in the future. If this were to happen, the link in the reference above would become redundant and the citation would not be useful to readers. What needs to be cited, therefore, is the blog post at the time at which you accessed it. Enter WebCite. WebCite is a service that archives a webpage and provides a permanent link for citation. This can be achieved by completing an archiving form. Our citation becomes:

Watson, S. (2017). Variations in NHS admissions at a glance. The Academic Health Economists’ Blog (ISSN 2514-3441). Available at: https://aheblog.com/2017/01/25/variations-in-nhs-admissions-at-a-glance/ [Accessed 8 Mar. 2017]. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6ooALaGyF)

4. Check the comments

Finally, authors may choose to subsequently publish their blog post elsewhere in another format or to upload it to a service such as figshare in order to obtain a DOI. Check the comments below a blog post to see if this is the case as there may be an alternative source that you might prefer to cite.

But as ever, if you’re struggling, get in touch.

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