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Let's assume that while researching and writing a paper you find a Twitter conversation between domain experts that is particularly useful for you.

  1. Given that it is not the sources that these experts list, but the spontaneous grouping of these sources for an argument that is useful, wouldn't it be dishonest to find sources that verify this information and then just cite the papers without citing the experts that led you down this line of thinking?

  2. Is it acceptable to cite a conversation from a social media source, such as Twitter, in an academic paper?

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I think that this can be clarified with a thought experiment. Let's say that rather than observing a Twitter conversation (or other social media), you were part of a three-way discussion with the two experts in the hallway at a conference. During the course of the conversation, some key facts and sources are mentioned, and this inspires you to look them up.

Would you cite the hallway conversation? Absolutely not. At most, you might mention your source of inspiration in an acknowledgement, if it was particularly important to your work.

Likewise, I think that you should feel no obligation to cite a conversation that you observed on Twitter, which is effectively the same thing in an electronic hallway conversation. (You can, of course, cite Twitter as a primary source, e.g., if you want to give an example of Twitter conversations, but that doesn't seem to be particularly germane to this question).

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    Frequently conversations are cited as "J. Doe, private communication", though I've never seen this applied to three-way conversations. Aug 22, 2015 at 10:51
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    Both "private communication" (or variants thereof) and "The author would like to thank X and Y for their helpful conversations on Z" in the acknowledgments seem fairly common to me. I think "private communication" is more suitable for tangible, new results that can fairly unambiguously be attributed to the other person, but are not publicly available, whereas "conversations" is suitable for more generic and broad-ranging stuff. Aug 23, 2015 at 1:26
  • I mostly but not entirely agree. Unlike a conversation in the hallway, which typically is not recorded, there is a written record of the conversation on Twitter people can refer back to. But because of the nature of Twitter, these conversations usually don't go into great depth, so probably an acknowledgement or "private communication" is good enough. Jul 22, 2023 at 1:13
  • @LambdaMoses The "written record" of social media is ephemeral at best, since it can generally be readily modified, hidden, or removed by the individuals involved or the company that runs the site.
    – jakebeal
    Jul 22, 2023 at 11:25

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