Any chance you have a link to Google scholar on the highest cited example?
Depends on the publication and the style guide they use. The ones I’m most familiar with are MLA & APA and they both have formats for how they want blogs cited.
I’m not sure how a blog would make the leap into being indexed as part of Google scholar though, unless it was first cited in a more traditional academic paper that fell into their domain.
Google scholar tracks citations by itself in some mysterious way, I have not contributed to that at all.
I would make a BibTeX @misc entry with the author, title, and URL. Similar example without even a URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Qiskit/qiskit/master/Qiski.... Here's how that shows up in Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=82533882547072366...
I understand it would look bad if your publication is citing only few blogs, but in such case the actual problem is that you need find existing publications or books in your area as well. Deciding that you won't cite a blog while you are using it for your work is not a solution to that.
I haven't used google scholar, but is the problem with limited knowledge of the tool that one don't know how to do it? Or is the tool itself limited? This makes me wonder whether the tools which doesn't easily allow one to track citations properly are part of the problem. This was definitely not a problem with bibtex[3]. Either way, that is not an excuse to basically commit an academic fraud.
[1] https://is.muni.cz/predmet/fi/VB000?lang=en [2] https://www.research-integrity.admin.cam.ac.uk/research-inte... [3] https://jonas-moennig.de/how-to-cite-a-website-with-bibtex/
Websites are easy as per that criteria.
The one I find annoying is when people cite like this. According to XYZ [1].... It establishes where the idea comes from, but sometimes lacks details that are needed to reconstruct the idea.
[1] Personal correspondence
It was a paper on a very relevant topic that would really be of interest. It had been cited in a dozen different papers, or so. But I could not find the cited paper anywhere!
I realized I could find the author of the cited paper, and just email them. They said "Oh, that was a conference presentation, it was never published as a paper anywhere, only presented orally at the conference."
Fine. Except... most of these citations didn't cite it as a conference presentation. Most of the citers, I am pretty sure were not at that conference. They just copy and pasted the citation from other papers, thinking the same as me, oh, that seems a useful cite. The first couple times it was cited, it might have actually been cited as a conference presentation at a particular conference on a particular date, but that wound up omitted from future copy pastes.
I don't think this was a particularly unusual occurence. Many citations are... unreliable.
A citation to something with an actual URL is pretty good.