A while ago The Valve had a post by Miriam Burstein asking about how one should go about citing one’s own blog in an article/book/whatnot. Burstein notes that there aren’t any disciplinary rules about how to cite one’s own blog (when it is used as a “work in progress” toward a longer piece). She proposes three possibilities for viewing a blog post:
1) Treat the blog as, in effect, a public working draft?
2) As a conference paper?
3) As a previous publication?
It’s an interesting question, and commenters brought up the issue of people googling passages from work and finding your blog instead of a citation to the work (if you don’t cite your blog) and the fact that it might be overwhelming to cite everything from your blog.
For my thesis, I took a mixture of these perspectives. Sometimes my blog was “a public working draft” and I’d cull a few sentences from it. Most of these passages that I “self-plagiarized,” though, were when I summarized an article or something I had read. I viewed it as the same as taking a paragraph I had written in a seminar paper and using it in the thesis. I can’t imagine going back and figuring out which ones and then citing them all.
At other times, I viewed it as a previous publication and quoted myself, but that was more when I was talking about the process of blogging.
I do think this raises an interesting question, one I hadn’t considered too much before — I had considered it in a way, but not for more than a few minutes, I suppose.
