Is it appropriate to "cite" random conversations as the inspiration for a research direction?
You can cite it as a &quot;private communication&quot; but it's more common (at least in my field, which is physics) to mention the person in the acknowledgements, for example, &quot;We thank A. Smith and B. Jones for useful discussions&quot;. You can make the phrasing more specific if you want, for example, &quot;We thank C. Davies for an insighful discussion about deep learning that inspired our approach to this work&quot;.