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I need relatively broad information on the functionality of a certain technology as part of the exposition to my seminar paper. As scholarly papers tend to focus on very specific questions, already taking the existence of my sought-for concepts for granted, and since suitable books don't seem available to me, I feel that I have to look for answers on a regular website.

For this, I've found a short article by a major corporation which happens to be the market leader of said technology. Is it acceptable to cite their web page in a seminar paper?

I understand that credibility of the used sources is a major concern. Given the fact they are market leader, I believe that credibility to be present. Do I need to name this company's status (e.g. "According to [company], market leader in [technology], ...") to validate the source? If so, would simply citing Wikipedia for this fact suffice, assuming their prevailing status on the market needs to be proven as well?

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I agree with the answers posted here so far, but I want to add a few points.

You can realistically use any source in your paper, but it depends on how you use it. If you want to write about what X company says about a particular topic, then using that particular web article seems appropriate. If you want to write something informative about a particular product that X company happens to use, then citing that article (written by X company) is a less than ideal choice. As @Buffy mentioned, the company has a vested interest in portraying the product in a certain way, but as @Richard Erickson mentioned, this article (or Wikipedia) can be a good initial stepping stone.

Articles that you use for information need to be peer reviewed in order to have a high level of credibility. Not having access to books is not a valid excuse; universities have a plethora of resources for this exact circumstance. I recommend Inter Library Loan (ILL) for hard to get books and journal articles. Your professor may have suggestions on where to start.

tl;dr:

  • you can use anything as a source (even Wikipedia), but it depends on how it’s used
  • peer reviewed sources are best for research credibility
  • you can find obscure resources using your university’s library privileges
  • consult with your professor
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Let me advise caution. In part it depends on what you expect the future of your paper to be. If it is to be published, then using volatile and un-reviewed sources can be a mistake. In the context of a course paper, not intended for publication it may be ok, but for tactical reasons (keeping your professor happy) if nothing else, don't depend exclusively on such sources. The problem is that the source may disappear before the publication that cites it.

The problems in the two examples you cite are that the company has a vested interest in what it says and isn't an independent voice. And wikipedia, while it may be reliable on many things, especially in STEM areas, is volatile and might change at any moment. Neither is it reviewed in any real sense and so misinformation does creep in.

Also, any web resource is subject to change outside your control and the articles you cite may disappear tomorrow. Such citations should always come with a date on which the article was read/downloaded as a partial check. And, your acceptance of their credibility is just opinion. It is a weak foundation unless it is backed up by facts or by others.

But, in general, you want reliable sources and preferably you want sources that don't benefit from what is said. But if you are clear about that, and also use more stable and reliable sources to support your arguments then you may be ok for a course paper. And you might actually be ok for a more long-lasting publication if you don't just accept what you have found online as truth. In particular, critiquing online claims is a perfectly valid use.

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    "is volatile and might change at any moment" is not a problem. You can cite (and link) a specific version (with time stamp) of each Wikipedia article. You can use the Wayback Machine for other websites.
    – user9482
    Commented Jul 16, 2019 at 11:56
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    @Roland, Wayback works for most, but not all, resources.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jul 16, 2019 at 12:08
  • @Roland In particular, many corporate web sites explicitly disallow the kind of indexing that Wayback requires.
    – JeffE
    Commented Jul 16, 2019 at 21:09
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Personally, I would use Wikipedia as a starting place and see who they cite. I would read the article and use the reference as starting place for my own literature search.

Academics will sometimes cite Wikipedia, but tend to be the exception rather than the rule. For example, Andrew Gelman cited Wikipedia for tutorials and noted:

We use Wikipedia here not as an authoritative source but rather as a reflection of a general consensus. My views on induction, deduction, and Bayesian inference are not in agreement with this consensus, and so it is my duty to explain, first, why my views are right and the consensus wrong, and, second, if the consensus is so clearly wrong, how could so many intelligent people hold to it.

In the above case, Gelman wrote one of the major Bayesian textbooks and can get away with citing Wikipedia in his specific context.

As for the cooperate page, I would only use their website as a primary source (e.g., Acme Company uses shiny new technology to make widgets). I might cite reports for companies, but I would cite those as reports and not webpages. For example, Bell Labs published reports. Also, sometimes companies publish reports that lay the foundation their technology (e.g., The PageRank Citation Ranking).

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I'll address the Wikipedia portion of the question specifically:

Do I need to name this company's status (e.g. "According to [company], market leader in [technology], ...") to validate the source? If so, would simply citing Wikipedia for this fact suffice, assuming their prevailing status on the market needs to be proven as well?

Since Wikipedia content can be changed at any moment, any citation to a Wikipedia article needs to refer to a specific revision of the article. And of course, that revision might just reflect one person's view, and that one person might or might not have a conflict of interest, which might or might not be discernible to the reader.

If you want to use Wikipedia to justify something like this, you'll need more than just the article. You might find that a statement like "company A is a leader in industry B" has footnotes; if so, look at those footnotes and see if one or more of them is worthy of citation. (A news article from a well-respected publication, that actually says that? Yes. Somebody's LinkedIn profile? No.) Or, by visiting the Wikipedia article's talk page, you might find that several Wikipedia editors have discussed the point, and decided that it belongs in the article for various reasons. Or, again by looking at the talk page, you might find that the article went through one of Wikipedia's formal peer review processes (like "featured article" or "good article") and that the statement withstood challenges in that discussion.

In any of those cases, the thing to cite is not the Wikipedia article itself, but the stuff that justifies the statement in the Wikipedia article. That is, the news publication used as a footnote, or the discussion on Wikipedia's talk page, or the Wikipedia review page.

Disclaimer and statement of expertise: I have been a Wikipedia editor since 2006, I run a business advising companies on Wikipedia engagement, and I designed the Wikimedia Foundation's first program to engage university professors in assigning Wikipedia writing to their students.

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