At the moment, I’ve been trying to work out how to best cite blog posts. I’ve got a few bibliographic tools – EndNote which is the “standard” one. That’s reasonably OK – the drawbacks being that the database resides on my work networked drive – but I can access that drive from most places with NetDrive. The other drawback at present is that the ToolBar in Word doesn’t quite work. I can post from EndNote to word, but can’t, on my PC, grab from Word. (I can on other PCs). (My PC has a few oddities, but I’m reluctant to let ISO rebuild it, as it will take forever to get back to the stage that I like it!)

Zotero – includes blog posts as a type of reference. It stores the references locally, so I have to export regularly (it also tends to slow down, so I have to clear it up.) There are some good features though, especially the ability to annotate files etc. Very easy with the tablet PC.
CiteULike seems good & I’ve found a several references via it. However, for some reason the bookmarklet seems to replace the page I’m looking at – not be a popup, as Connotea does.
I’m not so familiar with Connotea, but the fact that its bookmarklet is a popup & so I can see both at the same time is a distinct advantage!
Both Export to Endnote. Connotea says that it imports from it, but I can’t get it to. Maybe it’s the wrong version of EndNote!

Googling, to try to find out more about my particular question – citing blog posts, I’ve found a couple of useful sites:

  • Jeremy Douglass has created some code to display the citation at the foot of each post. He’s created a WordPress Plugin for it.
  • Robin Hansen discusses whether or not blog posts can harm, enhance or make no difference whatsoever to an academic career.
  • Dennis Jerz makes some suggestions for how to cite blog posts & comments in MLA style.

The citation plugin is now running, though I have to sort out the formatting!

6 thoughts on “Citing Blog postings

  1. Now that Zotero supports it, I hope more blogs will use unAPI. There’s a WordPress plugin, so I encourage you to start using it so that Zotero users can store citation metadata for your posts!

  2. Thanks for both of those; I’d already worked out that I have to use RIS to get between Zotero & EndNote; that it works rather better than the Zotero one called “EndNote”, if I want to preserve the notes that I’ve made.

    I’ll have a look at that plugin for the unAPI, though on the example I found (which was the unAPI news) it didn’t pick up the author of the post, so I had to add it manually.

  3. Sorry if I wasn’t clear–using either Refer or RIS exported from Endnote is the way to get data into Connotea as well.

    I see that you’ve installed the unAPI plugin–that’s great! Creator info gets imported into Zotero just fine for me.

  4. How weird; when I tried it… it didn’t tell me who’d written the post! Still, I know who wrote my posts & if it’s telling others who did, that’s useful.

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