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I will use this proof in manuscript. It is clearly plagiarism if I just write down the proof and do not cite the original content.

However, how do I cite an answer in StackExchange? It is neither a blog post, nor a text in a personal website. It is an answer to a question. Should I go with traditional style such as

[1] Gjergji Zaimi (stackexchange username) “Answer to Question 'Unique ways to keep N balls into K Boxes?' ” https://math.stackexchange.com/a/58756/130361. Aug 2011. Last accessed: 2017-02-12

or is there any formal method to do this?

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padawan
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  • Are you using a specific citation style? – Nate Eldredge Feb 12 '17 at 16:48
  • I am using IEEE Technical Report (ieeetr in LaTeX) style. – padawan Feb 12 '17 at 16:48
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    As a side comment, you should not cite this particular stackexchange answer unless you have a really good reason to cite it specifically. This is a standard topic in combinatorics ("compositions of n into k parts"), and it can be found in lots of textbooks. For example, it's in Section 1.2 of Stanley's Enumerative Combinatorics volume 1, as well as plenty of other books (where you can also find the proof given in the stackexchange answer, if you care about that specific proof). I can't think of any plausible circumstances in which this stackexchange answer would be the best source to cite. – Anonymous Mathematician Feb 12 '17 at 17:10
  • (But of course this doesn't answer the question of how to cite a stackexchange answer. Your proposal looks fine to me, but I'll leave others to give formal answers since they may have stronger opinions about citation styles.) – Anonymous Mathematician Feb 12 '17 at 17:10
  • @AnonymousMathematician I particularly picked this proof since it does not go deep into technicality, but only provides a to-the-point proof. – padawan Feb 12 '17 at 18:03
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    The same proof is given in the Handbook of Combinatorics (Volume II, Chapter 21, page 1026, which is the same as page 4 of the preprint http://www-math.mit.edu/~rstan/pubs/pubfiles/79.pdf). – Anonymous Mathematician Feb 12 '17 at 21:29
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    @padawan Even if the proof is good in your context, the source is not. In many subject areas internet souces are not considered good because of many factors (questionable site reputation, user generated, subject to edits/removal, not peer-reviewed, ...) – Ian Feb 13 '17 at 07:43
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    Cited references are expected to be "reliable" and come in many ways: journal papers, conference papers, theses and books. Still, time changes! Some people started to cite blog, tweets, etc. In your situation, the problem is that the SO answer is not original but was more of a helper. You could cite the SO answer in the acknowledgments of the article, either with a URL in the text or with a citation to a "Misc" or "Electronic" item in bibtex, thus having a proper author and year for the citation. – Pierre de Buyl Feb 13 '17 at 09:17
  • So, in general (not the specific answer given in question), I should use published material for a manuscript. Could one of you please write your comment as an answer so I can accept? – padawan Feb 13 '17 at 11:05
  • A blogposting by me was cited in this paper see the footnote on page 12. So, you can cite unconventional non-peer reviewed sources, but only if they contain relevant original content that cannot be found in peer reviewed sources that were published earlier. Note that in such cases you should actually cite the unconventional source, as you need to give credit to the original authors. – Count Iblis Feb 14 '17 at 00:48
  • This question has been addressed in the network's meta: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/49760/245125 – Cape Code Mar 09 '17 at 10:43

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There is a link at the bottom that provides a citation in bibtex or amsrefs format;

citation link

Clicking on this particular link the bibtex citation generated is;

@MISC {58756, TITLE = {Unique ways to keep N balls into K Boxes?}, AUTHOR = {Gjergji Zaimi (https://math.stackexchange.com/users/14274/gjergji-zaimi)}, HOWPUBLISHED = {Mathematics Stack Exchange}, NOTE = {URL:https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756 (version: 2011-08-21)}, EPRINT = {https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756}, URL = {https://math.stackexchange.com/q/58756} }

You could put that in your .bib file. From that point, it really depends how the rest of your citations are being formated. You might get something like;

citation style

That seems like a pretty standardised way to do it.

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Clumsy cat
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    How do I do this for other sites like stack overflow? – Pro Q Nov 11 '18 at 21:38
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    @ProQ Well you could fill in equivalent details in the same form as auto generated for the sites that do support it? – Clumsy cat Nov 13 '18 at 10:53
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    That doesn't appear to be the case for all, or even most, Stack Exchange sites. For instance here you only have Share, Edit, Follow, Flag. Same with Philosophy. They should add the feature to all sites though, in my opinion. – Hack-R Aug 27 '23 at 23:47
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Here is another, more specific example:

Over on Mathematica.SE a rewrite of a minimization algorithm to save computational time helped the OP of this question to complete some data analysis and publish a paper. The reimplementation was cited in the paper as Ref. 35.

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