A, B, C, D are interesting works on the topic of X, but they are not ‘logo references’ such as Foucault or Appadurai. They are good for a particular line of discussion only.

Since I know Y personally, I kind of know that he probably knew those references from my work. I have no idea whether he had really read those literatures since he only drop a few words on each or just listed the references. There should be no problem if he learnt their sources from me and digested them himself. However, the whole paragraph reads like it was he who organized those literatures in that order and under a certain conceptual framework, while in fact I had done so earlier and he read it.

I think there is a gray area here. Yes he had mentioned my article, but he did not mention that the review of ABCD on the topic of X was also my idea (in that same article), or at least he agreed with me. I had spent a few months searching, sorting and reading those materials to come up with my own way of making sense the intellectual development on topic X. Seeing that I was not properly acknowled on that part of academic effort was not a pleasant experience.

If Dershowitz was REALLY trying to get to the bottom of things he would be cross-checking the claims in “From Time Immemorial”. Lifting citations and reproducing them without regard to their validity or giving credit to the original author (and thereby demonstrating your chain of logic to those who would like to examine your claims) IS intellectually dishonest. It’s hard to think that someone who writes as much on the topic as Dershowitz didn’t know that the book existed, and hadn’t been familiar with it’s claims, and yet still magically comes up with the same information that said book presents, but in an entirely separated context. It just doesn’t seem like an honest mistake to me.

Funny you should say that, I just caught a student plagiarizing. She had two quotes and two citations that just so happened to exactly match the same quotes and citations as they appeared on one of my colleagues blogs.

As I said in my post: “it is not the mere fact of citation that is at stake, as Poser mistakenly infers, but rather the wholesale appropriation of another scholar’s academic labor, warts and all.”

To connect this thread to earlier ones, I think citations in the humanities and social sciences very often operate like brands or trademarks. They are a shorthand way that people position themselves in a commercial field, viz. the so-called marketplace of ideas. People are implicitly aware of this, and so the actual content of the citation (what it denotes) is less important than the fuzzier activity of positioning an idea in a good spot on the supermarket shelf (what the citation connotes). For junior scholars, this very often means that a citation gives one’s own ideas the touch of authority (the appearance of erudition). Some of my teachers were strongly opposed to this practice, and would require citations to include not just author and date, but the specific pages that one is addressing in the citation.

I may not make it clear enough in my post, but I do agree with Poser that there are some cases where it is OK to cite something you haven\’t read – where the point is simply that a certain literature exists. However, I personally resisted the pressure from my committee to write the kind of literature review chapter that certain members wanted in my thesis. I know it is part of what our discipline has come to expect, but I feel it is more important to build an argument than to demonstrate erudition and I am particularly uncomfortable with what Fred calls the mere \”appearance of erudition.\”

Still, a dissertation and a proposal are quite different beasts. At the proposal stage I think it is fine to over-reach since you are merely marking out the territory you wish to explore down the road. But in the end one has to find one\’s own comfort level.

(It’s possible that I’m just feeling overly defensive since I’m writing my field work proposal and being told that I should explain how I articulate with about 5 distinct literatures with hundreds of publications in each, and the implication that it’s intellectually lazy for me to rely on a couple of second-hand summaries feels unfair. But perhaps that is not what your are trying to imply. Or perhaps you have an idea of how to do this efficiently, in which case, please share!)