On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 12:25 +0530, Sumit Adhikari wrote:
> Dear User Community,
> 
> This mail is in particular to the citation of D.
> 
> D is extremely poorly cited (Yes this comes from a R&D guy). I searched and
> searched (everywhere including IEEEXplore) and nothing comes in my hand!
> 
> There are materials available on internet which are not peer reviewed and hence I cannot use for Journal citation! It is like I have everything but I cannot cite!

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?

> It would be great idea as a beneficiary of D to publish for the future of D. Please consider what I am saying :). Please publish.

Walter Bright has published a number of papers in Dr Dobb's Journal and elsewhere, For example:

http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/implementing-pure-functions/230700070 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over-75/240158941

Others have written and published in other places. There were some articles about D published in CVu, the journal of ACCU (http://www.accu.org) for example.

And then there is:

Alexandrescu A, The D Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, 2010.

A fine publication, with certain publishing faults that lead to extreme collector pressure on value :-)

The last point for now is that there is academic programming language research, and there is real world programming language development. The two are very different – believe me I have done both. So whilst Scala, which came from academia, has academic publications, Ceylon, Kotlin, Groovy, Ruby, Clojure, C++, D, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc., etc. are developed almost entirely in a commercial or FOSS setting and so have no academic publications associated with them per se. D is not unique in this position.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

Dear Russel,

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

I do not make rules, I follow them. I know my reviewers very well, so better I be critical on what I put in.

Regards, Sumit


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Russel Winder <russel@winder.org.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 12:25 +0530, Sumit Adhikari wrote:
> > Dear User Community,
> >
> > This mail is in particular to the citation of D.
> >
> > D is extremely poorly cited (Yes this comes from a R&D guy). I searched
> and
> > searched (everywhere including IEEEXplore) and nothing comes in my hand!
> >
> > There are materials available on internet which are not peer reviewed and hence I cannot use for Journal citation! It is like I have everything
> but I
> > cannot cite!
>
> 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?
>
> > It would be great idea as a beneficiary of D to publish for the future of D. Please consider what I am saying :). Please publish.
>
> Walter Bright has published a number of papers in Dr Dobb's Journal and elsewhere, For example:
>
> http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/implementing-pure-functions/230700070 http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over-75/240158941
>
> Others have written and published in other places. There were some articles about D published in CVu, the journal of ACCU (http://www.accu.org) for example.
>
> And then there is:
>
> Alexandrescu A, The D Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, 2010.
>
> A fine publication, with certain publishing faults that lead to extreme collector pressure on value :-)
>
> The last point for now is that there is academic programming language research, and there is real world programming language development. The two are very different – believe me I have done both. So whilst Scala, which came from academia, has academic publications, Ceylon, Kotlin, Groovy, Ruby, Clojure, C++, D, Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc., etc. are developed almost entirely in a commercial or FOSS setting and so have no academic publications associated with them per se. D is not unique in this position.
>
> --
> Russel.
>
> =============================================================================
> Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip:
> sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net
> 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk
> London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
>
>


-- 
Sumit Adhikari,

Sumit,

On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 19:09 +0530, Sumit Adhikari wrote:
> Dear Russel,
> 
> Thanks for the comments and suggestions.
> 
> I do not make rules, I follow them. I know my reviewers very well, so better I be critical on what I put in.
> 
> Regards, Sumit

You are right to be cautious, though I wouldn't want you to "over think" the problem and/or make too rigid assumptions about reviewers' opinions.

I am assuming then the core problem is "peer reviewed papers in academic journals and conferences" rather than URLs. I would suggest that you can still cite material about D even though it is not in peer reviewed academic journals and conferences, but make it clear that it is not "peer reviewed" in the academic sense. The point here is to make clear in your work the nature of the reference being cited, show that you are using the data in a properly academic way. A corollary here is that you don't use "opinion pieces", just works that present data pertinent to your work.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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.)

On Mon, 2013-11-18 at 10:57 +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote: […]
> 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/

This is a variant on the compromise I went with as journal and book series editor. It works well. Citations are to archived material that has a 99.999999% chance of being accessible in 15 years time, everything else was handled as a footnote or end note.

The very worst thing for me in terms of citation is ones like (personal communication, 1984). I banned that one.


-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Monday, 18 November 2013 at 13:15:32 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> The very worst thing for me in terms of citation is ones like (personal
> communication, 1984). I banned that one.

I think some of those come from the fact that they are present in the style-guides for several journals, which people sometimes take as a green light.

On 18/11/13 14:15, Russel Winder wrote:
> The very worst thing for me in terms of citation is ones like (personal
> communication, 1984). I banned that one.

Personally I do think there's a value to that, simply as a means of giving credit to someone who contributed an idea or unpublished result that turned out to be fruitful but didn't have enough involvement in the work to really count as an author.  Though I favour the solution journals like Nature came up with, which is to have that citation in the text but not the reference list, like this (A. N. Other, personal communication) and not like this [1]

   [1] S. B. D. Else, personal communication.

> Citations are to archived material that has a 99.999999% chance of being
> accessible in 15 years time

There's a certain irony in the fact that, given the constraints of print publication, various books and journal articles are now in many ways much _less_ accessible than supposedly ephemeral URLs.