Are blogs acceptable sources for academic papers?

It depends on the blog and the assignment. Expert and institutional blogs can be appropriate for current perspectives or for topics not yet covered in the peer-reviewed literature. Anonymous personal blogs rarely are. When in doubt, ask your instructor.

What if the blog post doesn't have a title?

APA's practice for a work with no title is a description in square brackets in the title position: its artwork guidance says “for untitled artwork, include a description in square brackets in place of a title”, and its archival guidance says to give a bracketed description, unitalicized, when a document has no title. Describe the post plainly enough that a reader knows what you mean. For a comment rather than a post, APA uses the comment's title or its first 20 words instead (see the comment example below).

How do I know if a blog author is credible?

Check their credentials (education, professional role), institutional affiliation and other publications, and whether their claims line up with the peer-reviewed literature. Anonymous authors are much harder to evaluate, which is a reason to prefer a source you can check.

How do I cite a Medium article?

Like any other blog post: author, date, post title, then Medium as the italicized site name, then the URL. Medium is the container, not the author.

Should I include the access date?

Not for a dated blog post: APA's own blog-post reference carries no retrieval date. APA adds “Retrieved [date] from” only where the content is designed to change and is not archived—its YouTube *channel* examples do this, its blog post example does not. Chicago's 18th-edition Citation Quick Guide says that “if a source does not list a date of publication or revision, include an access date”, and offers citing an Internet Archive capture as an alternative.

How to Cite a Blog Post

Blogs range from casual personal musings to authoritative expert commentary. The citation format is straightforward, but deciding whether a blog is an appropriate source requires judgment. Here's how to handle both.

Basic Blog Citation

Most blog citations need the author (individual, organization, or username), the post date, the post title, the blog or site name, and the URL.

Quick Reference by Major Style

APA (7th Edition):

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of blog post. Blog Name. URL

APA's own published example:

Ouellette, J. (2019, November 15). Physicists capture first footage of quantum knots unraveling in superfluid. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/study-you-can-tie-a-quantum-knot-in-a-superfluid-but-it-will-soon-untie-itself/

Note which part is italicized. APA Style says blog posts "follow the same format as journal articles" and instructs you to "italicize the name of the blog, the same as you would a journal title." The post title stays in plain sentence case. (If you have seen advice to italicize the post title instead, it does not match APA's published guidance.)

A second example, verified against the blog itself:

Meadows, A. (2026, September 16). Kitchen essentials: An interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/16/kitchen-essentials-an-interview-with-daniela-saderi-of-prereview/

MLA (9th Edition):

Author. "Title of Blog Post." Blog Name, Day Month Year, URL.

MLA builds every entry from its template of core elements — author, title of source, title of container, publication date, location — so a blog post is assembled the same way as any other article on a website. The MLA Style Center's own example of an article on a website shows the pattern:

Deresiewicz, William. "The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur." The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2014, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497/.

Applied to a blog post:

Meadows, Alice. "Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview." The Scholarly Kitchen, 16 Sept. 2026, scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/16/kitchen-essentials-an-interview-with-daniela-saderi-of-prereview/.

MLA puts post titles in quotation marks and the site name in italics.

Chicago (18th Edition, Notes–Bibliography):

Chicago's free Citation Quick Guide gives no separate blog template. It groups blogs with news and magazine articles, saying that "articles from newspapers or news sites, magazines, blogs, and the like are cited similarly," with page numbers (if any) in a note but not in the bibliography. So follow its news-article pattern:

Note:

Alice Meadows, "Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview," The Scholarly Kitchen, September 16, 2026, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/16/kitchen-essentials-an-interview-with-daniela-saderi-of-prereview/.

Bibliography:

Meadows, Alice. "Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Daniela Saderi of PREreview." The Scholarly Kitchen, September 16, 2026. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/16/kitchen-essentials-an-interview-with-daniela-saderi-of-prereview/.

Author Types

Named individual author — the ordinary case, as in the examples above.

Several authors on one post:

Ghildiyal, A., Fédérico, M., & Machado, M. (2026, September 17). Rethinking scholarly evaluation: Matching rigor to purpose. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/09/17/rethinking-scholarly-evaluation-matching-rigor-to-purpose/

Organization as author — some institutional blogs publish under the organization's name rather than a person's:

DOAJ. (2026, September 7). The story behind the journal: International Social Research Nexus (ISRN). DOAJ Blog. https://blog.doaj.org/2026/09/07/the-story-behind-the-journal-international-social-research-nexus-isrn/

Username or handle — when a post or comment is signed only with a handle, use the handle exactly as it appears. APA's own example of a blog comment shows this:

joachimr. (2019, November 19). We are relying on APA as our university style format - the university is located in Germany (Kassel). So I [Comment on the blog post "The transition to seventh edition APA Style"]. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/transition-seventh-edition#comment-4694866690

If you can identify the real name behind a handle and the author uses it publicly, prefer the real name.

No author identified: start the entry with the post title, in the author position.

[Title of post]. ([Year, Month Day]). [Blog Name]. [URL]

Blog Posts vs. Online Articles

The line between "blog" and "online article" blurs, and the styles handle it by container rather than by label. APA's newspaper guidance is explicit: if a piece comes from a news website that has no associated daily or weekly newspaper, use the webpage format rather than the newspaper format. Chicago, as quoted above, treats news sites, magazines and blogs alike.

In practice: if the site calls the section a blog, posts are dated, and an individual voice is prominent, treat it as a blog. If it is a news site or magazine with an editorial process, use the article format. Either way the elements are the same — author, date, title, container, URL.

Academic and Expert Blogs

Blogs run by researchers, professionals and institutions can be legitimate sources:

Researcher blogs: personal sites where academics discuss their own work.
Institutional blogs: universities, research centres, scholarly infrastructure organizations and professional associations — for example the Crossref blog or the Internet Archive's blog.
Industry expert blogs: practitioners writing about their field.

These may be appropriate for academic work when the author has relevant expertise, the content is substantive and reasoned, and no peer-reviewed source covers the point.

When Blogs Aren't Appropriate

Be cautious about citing blogs when peer-reviewed sources exist on the topic, the author lacks identifiable credentials, the post is opinion without evidence, or the content is out of date.

For formal academic papers, peer-reviewed sources should be your foundation. Blogs supplement — they don't replace — scholarly literature.

Blog Comments

Comments are informal and often anonymous, so think about whether the comment is really necessary for your argument. Both APA and Chicago do provide a format.

APA credits the commenter (real name or handle), then the comment's title or first 20 words, then "Comment on the blog post" and the post title in square brackets — as in the joachimr example above.

Chicago cites a reader comment in the text or a note only, never in the bibliography. Its own example:

Michelle (Reno), December 15, 2023, comment on Blum, "Flax Seeds."

Undated Blog Posts

If no date is visible, APA uses (n.d.) in the date position:

[Author, A. A.]. (n.d.). [Title of post]. [Blog Name]. [URL]

Check for dates in the URL, the post metadata, or a "first published" line before falling back to n.d.

Blog Posts That Have Been Updated

If a post shows a revision date as well as an original date, cite the version you read and say so in your text, rather than inventing a compound date:

Meadows (2026) — as revised on [date of the version you read] — argues that...

Chicago's Citation Quick Guide handles this for web pages by giving a "last modified" date, and offers a Wayback Machine capture as an alternative when you need to pin down the version you saw.

Citing Multiple Posts From Same Blog

If you draw on several posts, cite each one individually. Don't cite "the blog" in general — cite the specific posts that support your points.

Verifying Blog Citations

Unlike journal articles, blog posts can be edited or removed. Read them early, keep a copy for your own records, and check every URL before you submit.

If a post disappears, look for it in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; Chicago explicitly allows citing an archived capture.

Where These Rules Come From

APA: the "Blog Post and Blog Comment References" and "Newspaper Article References" pages on the APA Style site (apastyle.apa.org), both citing Publication Manual Section 10.1, plus its artwork and archival guidance for the bracketed-description rule. APA's site refuses automated requests, so these were read through Internet Archive captures; the Ouellette and joachimr examples and every quoted APA sentence come from those captures.
MLA: the MLA Style Center's "Works Cited: A Quick Guide" (core elements) and "Citations by Format" (the Deresiewicz example, listed under "Article on a website") — style.mla.org, read live.
Chicago: the free Chicago Manual of Style 18th-edition Citation Quick Guide, Notes and Bibliography (chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide), read live — the "News or magazine article" and "Web page" sections and the Michelle (Reno) comment note.
The three 2026 posts were checked against the publishers' own pages: the two Scholarly Kitchen posts (published 16 and 17 September 2026; bylines Alice Meadows, and Ashutosh Ghildiyal, Mathïs Fédérico and Maria Machado) and the DOAJ Blog post (7 September 2026, published under DOAJ's name). The Ars Technica article behind APA's example was also opened: Jennifer Ouellette, 15 November 2019.