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In this question, I received a spot-on one line answer in a comment that referred me to a more extensive answer by someone else to a different question on MathOverflow. I plan to acknowledge David Eppstein for his answer on MathOverflow, and to cite one or more of the papers he referred to in his answer. I'm interested, though, in what people think about acknowledging brief comments, especially since the commenter reposted his comment as an answer in an almost under-protest way.

In this specific situation, if the commenter (Peter Shor) were to say, "Yes please acknowledge me," or, "No, don't," I would move with that, either way, so I'm not that concerned with the specific. Rather, I'd like to hear more generally about people's thoughts on guidelines for citations and acknowledgements, and how you'd like them to relate to use of this site.

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    $\begingroup$ Would you acknowledge the guy that tells you at the coffee machine of someone who he knows has the answer to your problem? This is about the same thing. (Note that my question is not rhetorical.) $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Jan 21, 2011 at 15:51
  • $\begingroup$ You may also see How will you cite a discussion on this site in your paper. $\endgroup$
    – Sadeq Dousti
    Jan 22, 2011 at 0:34

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I think that in this particular case the best solution is to cite David Eppstein for a 'personal communication' (you can even use the mathoverflow cite link for that), and link to the actual papers in your bibliography. I don't think Peter would mind not being formally acknowledged for pointing you to David's answer: the coffee machine analogy is not too far off here.

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    $\begingroup$ see my updated answer. This should be enabled here as well. $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Atwood
    Apr 4, 2011 at 4:52
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    $\begingroup$ All I did was direct you to David Eppstein's answer, which I remembered seeing on Math Overflow (and then found again through search). You shouldn't acknowledge me. I think you should acknowledge David. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Shor
    Apr 7, 2011 at 23:15
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We have implemented citations using the same model as MO using both Bibtex and amsref. Click link, then click cite on the link popup.

link menu panel

citation panel

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    $\begingroup$ that's neat. Will be very useful. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Apr 4, 2011 at 5:21
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you. That looks great. :-) $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Apr 5, 2011 at 14:27
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At the end of papers in the acknowledgement section I usually find comments like "AK would like to acknowledge X,Y,Z for helpful discussion, and Q and Z for introducing him to the problem". I don't know the full protocol for how this section of a paper works, but if had useful comments or literature pointers that I got from cstheory, then I would include something like "AK would like to acknowledge X,Y and Z for helping discussion on cstheory.stackexchange.com/".

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