Hat Tip
An informal credit acknowledging the person who pointed you to a source or idea.
A hat tip — often abbreviated h/t or HT — is a lightweight acknowledgement. It credits not the original author of an idea or source, but the person who brought it to the writer's attention: a colleague who sent the link, a reader who pointed out the reference, a fellow blogger whose post led you to the primary source. The gesture originates in the literal tipping of a hat as a mark of respect, and the phrase became a fixed convention in early-2000s blogging.
The hat tip is a citation of a middle step in the chain of transmission. It does not replace attributing the underlying source: if Alice discovered a study and Bob linked to Alice, a careful writer cites the study and hat-tips Alice. Skipping the hat tip is not academically dishonest — it is only bad manners in a networked culture where credit for surfacing something has real value.
The convention has hardened enough that most house styles for online writing treat it as standard. The Atlantic, most newsletter platforms, and much of the science blogosphere accept 'h/t Alice Chen' as a parenthetical or footer. In print journalism the older analogue is 'as [X] first noted', which does similar work with more words.
Common mistake: hat-tipping the aggregator instead of citing the source. A hat tip credits the messenger; it does not substitute for reading and citing the thing itself.
“The 1846 dispatch is quoted in full in Berger's Ways of Seeing (h/t Mira Patel, who sent me to the passage).”
Keep reading the glossary
A formal reference that lets a reader locate the source of a quote.
A note printed at the bottom of a page giving a citation, a qualification, or a small side-comment.
An in-text source reference given in parentheses, keyed to a fuller entry in the bibliography.
A Latin citation abbreviation for confer, 'compare' — used to point the reader to a related passage.