On 17/11/13 10:25, Russel Winder wrote:
Clearly URLs have to be considered ephemera as far as academic
publication is concerned. However there are three classes of ephemera:
1. non-publishing websites; 2. publishing-related websites; and 3.
publishing related archives.
As an academic (admittedly a long time ago now), I would refuse to use
or allow use of (as an editor of journal or conference proceedings) URLs
in Category 1. However categories 2 and 3 are more reliable and so
acceptable. Actually they are mandatory these days with the emerging
academic publishing models. So where does this "ban" on using online
material for citations come from? Are you self-censoring based on the
notion of peer reviewed paper published journal?
I have to say that, in my experience, the rules here seem to vary a great deal
according to journal and field. URLs are reasonably widely used, and I think
that a good rule of thumb is simply: "How future-proof do I think this URL will
be in practice?" (*)
So, I don't think it would be a problem to cite the D programming language
website, unless there are specific style guide rules against it for the
particular journal or conference proceedings you are writing for.
Some publications seem opposed to URLs as citations but OK with them as
footnotes. So a reasonable compromise might be to cite Andrei's book and also
add a footnote to http://dlang.org/
(* Ironically, given that it disavows any claim to being a citeable resource,
and given the kerfuffle over various eminent professors publishing articles with
titles like, "Why you can't cite Wikipedia in my class", Wikipedia pages seem
quite widely cited as general-purpose overviews of many different topics.)
