Over the past months, I asked several questions mainly regarding graphics and plotting. Here are some sample questions
All the provided answers helped me significantly to construct the illustration of a paper. Now the paper is completed and I am wondering what is the best and most appropriate way to acknowledge in my paper all the help I received from here?
If Mathematica.StackExchange can be considered as a community, whose members contribute according to their needs and abilities, you could consider acknowledging the community as a whole, rather than the individuals involved. After all, there's a lot of code-borrowing and recycling going on...
So why not just acknowledge the Mathematica.StackExchange community as a whole?
Disclaimer: I know nothing about academe, and these views might well be heretical...
I ran the following simple query on the Stack Exchange Data Explorer in order to find out the users you should acknowledge for helping you in that questions:
SELECT distinct u.DisplayName
FROM
Posts p
INNER JOIN
Users u ON p.OwnerUserId = u.Id
WHERE
ParentId in (37970, 37025, 36944, 36724, 33429, 30623, 29403)
The results are rather interesting. I've split the list in two groups, according to the facial expression I can imagine in an eventual referee (or dept. director, coworker, gf, wife, etc.) while reading their names on your paper :
Group A
Anon
Coolwater
cormullion
halirutan
Kuba
lalmei
Michael E2
Mr.Wizard
Nasser
Pinguin Dirk
PlatoManiac
ubpdqn
VLC
Wizard
Group B
Rahul Narain
Romke Bontekoe
Timothy Wofford
ybeltukov
As you know, referees tend to be quite fussy in analyzing references (mostly because they want their friends' names there, but that is another story), so perhaps the "Group A" names shouldn't be mentioned as "references".
That still leaves open the possibility of mentioning them in the "acknowledgements" section (if you have one). In a book that's where the names of your family, financial and emotional supporters, etc. are going to be, but in a paper the usual practice is just a quick recognition for those institutions which (usually inadvertently) diverted funds for your amusement.
So, as I said in a comment above, perhaps the promise of a six-pack is enough.
I know that the American Chemical Society publishes the ACS style Guide which includes a chapter on references. Their general rule for reference citing is:
For material other than books and journals, sufficient information must be provided so that the source can be identified and located.
They identify several electronic sources outside of electronic versions of books and journals that include: online encyclopedias; web sites; and electronic lists/newsgroups.
If we consider Stack Exchange Network a "General Webs Site" then the author would likely not be the users who answered the question, but rather the authors of the service provider, most likely Joel Spolsky.
If we consider Stack Exchange Network an electronic list or newsgroup, then no author is provided, for example:
Computational Chemistry List, solvent discussion in archived messages of September 2003, [email protected] (accessed Nov 10, 2004).
In skimming through the document, those are the only two formats I could find that would meet the standards of a suitable reference while avoiding the tricky issue of using avatar names.
While we're at it, the use of pseudonyms suggests some level of anonymity, which may place StackExchange Q&A into a separate category:
Whether the message was personal and set only to you or whether it was posted in a newsgroup, it is not published. E-mail messages should be cited the same as any other personal communication.
So if there is a case where we need to consider StackExchange Q&A as personal communications, there are ethical considerations for citing such information:
Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, should not be used or reported in the author’s work without explicit permission from the investigator with whom the information originated.
I suspect this last point is not an issue, since all users of the Stack Exchange Network have agreed that material posted here falls under Creative Commons.
In your case, it might be appropriate to insert a reference to the Stack Exchange Network in the same section you use to cite the software used for data acquisition and manipulation. Then, in the acknowledgements section a general thank you to the "active users" of M.SE. It may be nice to provide an opportunity for those who have helped to provide their real names, as you never know if @belisarius is actually a 12 year old savant looking for early admission into Harvard and needs some more name recognition.
