Suppose I’m writing a research paper and I get an idea from a thread on this board. Perhaps a poster sketches the outlines of an interesting argument and I want to run with it. Would/should I be required to acknowledge this in my paper? How would I do so?
(FWIW, this is hypothetical. None of you have inspired me lately. 
)
I’m not sure you’d be obligated to acknowledge the source, given that message board postings are semi-anonymous and none of us can reasonably expect to get credit for them. Plus, it’d look pretty silly to credit someone named “tim314” in an academic paper.
If you wanted to acknowledge the source, though, it’d probably make sense to e-mail the poster in question, asking if they’d want to be given credit, and if so, what their actual name is. Then you could credit them as “Tim Lastname – personal communication” or something like that. That wouldn’t seem so odd – more than once I’ve seen people cite private correspondence and such in published academic papers.
Typically whatever style your paper will be formatted with will define how to cite ambiguous or anonymous web sites.
ETA. Your prof or TA googles something in your text and it comes back with an SDMB posting, they will be looking at you for plagiarism. Better safe than sorry even if you do flesh out the argument on your own.
It does look silly, but I’ve seen it done in settings ranging from news articles to books. Usually the quoting author uses a more textual citation: “…who goes by the online name of TimeWinder”, sometimes with the real name attached, if they know it.
The best ones, in my opinion, are the ones that give enough detail that you’d be able to find the source if you needed to: “On 4/15/2008, on the Straight Dope Message Board (http: // boards.straightdope. com/sdmb), a user with the online name of TimeWinder writes that hummingbird hums don’t echo, and no one knows why…”
But Projammer is right: if you’re lucky enough to be using a defined style guide, check it – this is becoming common enough that recent versions will mention it.
I do think you’re obligated to cite, though; plagiarism is presenting the words or ideas of others as your own without attribution. Even if you don’t know who to attribute, you need to at least acknowledge that it wasn’t you.
And if you’re lucky, the poster cited won’t have a name that’s cringe-inducing in an academic paper. I’m sure Hugh Jass is a great guy and a fertile source of ideas, but all the same, I think in his case I’d follow tim314’s advice above.
Keep in mind that acknowledging the source serves two purposes–it gives people a place to look for more information on a topic, and it avoids plagiarism by showing where you got the idea, assuming that the idea was not yours. Whether the original source expects credit is beside the point.
Although, in academia, those who write papers which become published in peer-reviewed journals do want credit, because seeing how influential someone’s ideas were is one of the ways that people are judged for tenure purposes, etc.
Still, I agree with TimeWinder’s ideas of appropriate ways to credit semi-anonymous people on the internet.
umm…am I missing something?
what kind of post from this board would need to be credited in a formal paper?
If I am writing a masters thesis on hummingbirds, couldn’t I just open the paper by saying that " hums don’t echo, and this paper proposes a reason why". My paper would begin with a summary of previous research–based on other published journals, not on Tim314’s anonymous post on the SDMB.
Now, in the true spirit of us Dopers, I assume that Tim314 would include our favorite word in his post about hummingbirds : CITE.
And if I used his cite in my academic paper, wouldn’t I have to accredit the cite and its sources, not Tim314?
okay, I admit that I haven’t read a peer-reviewed academic journal for 20 years, but what am I not understanding here?
Actually, I have published an article in a peer-reviewed paper that cited two Dopers (Bibliophage and whitetho), because they helped me to track down an obscure citation on a thread I posted. I just put something like “I acknowledge the assistance of bibliophage and whitetho of the SDMB on this point.”
The editors at the journal never batted an eye.
In another peer-reviewed paper, I acknowledged the assistance of DSYoungEsq under his off-screen name, but didn’t mention the SDMB because that was in an e-mail he sent me, not on-line.
Well, let’s say I said “humming birds don’t hum”, you said “cite”, and I said “see page 326 of The Big Book of Hummingbirds.” If you went and looked it up in the book, then I think you could just cite “The Big Book of Hummingbirds.” But if you can’t find the book and you’re just taking my word for it that that’s what the book says, you probably need to cite me as a secondary source. Although given that you have no idea what my credentials are, you’d probably be better off leaving my factual assertions out of your paper altogether. (Anyway, if the topic is hummingbirds, colibri is the doper you want to talk to.)
I think that the OP isn’t actually talking about factual claims (which you should be able to verify from more formal sources than a message board), but rather ideas. Like, say I posted something like:
If you wanted to flesh that outline out into a paper, you would I suppose have no choice but to cite me, since the idea is original to me.
When a posting of mine from another messageboard was quoted in The Guardian, they just cited me as “a poster on X”… I was a little peeved to be honest as I was perfectly contactable. I see it as an extremely lazy way of filling out an article, and talking to other posters on that forum it isn’t the first time a UK news outlet has lifted stuff from that particular messageboard either.
Wow! Can I quote you on that?
*
snerk*
Sorry. I agree with TimeWinder’s suggestions, though, and was coming in here to second Eureka’s take: in all things citational, you’re aiming to *both *give credit and leave a trail for information-seekers.
Make sure you get the attribution correct. Capital “T”, capital “W.” My cite is here (video clip of hummingbirds, no audio) – listen; no echoes.
chappachula, your point is well taken that the SDMB might not be a very good source (in the citations & experts sense) of factual information (see above), but there are plenty of papers/articles which cite opinion, eyewitness accounts, socialogical trends (if I see another mainstream news article talking about “Second Life,” for example, I’m likely to scream), and other things for which inexpert quotes might still have value. And for independently verifiable or technical information, even expertise might be found among us.
Nicely done.