Plagiarism and Moral Hazard

Nobody responded to this in class today about my question of whether you intended to go do graduate school in economics, but consider this (very low probability) scenario where every student in the class raised their hands, either earnestly or because they misrepresented their preferences in a way that they thought would advantage them.  How would I have reacted in that case?  (Note that to get into graduate school you need letters of recommendation from your professors.)  This would have created some moral hazard for me!

Here are the links to the papers I showed about plagiarism.  This essay by Jonathan Lethem is really a great read, so I encourage you to have a go at it after the semester is over.  It will get you to reconsider your own beliefs about what "original thinking" means and how much of a debt we have to contributions that have come before our own.  Also, it might help you understand that one joy I have as a professor is when some former student plagiarizes me, and then lets me know about it.

And here is the piece of mine called Do we plagiarize inadvertently?  The thought behind the piece is that we (professors, librarians, campus administrators) read students the riot act about academic integrity, but don't attend to the practical education or how to deal with citation (or lack thereof).  I do think as a good citizen you should make some efforts to cite properly, even in informal communication, but before too long there are diminishing returns, so there is no doubt we are less careful about citation in informal communication.

There is one topic I had wanted to discuss in class today but forgot to do so.  This is about citing works that you haven't read, or have read but didn't understand.  What is the right thing to do in this case?  What is the common practice?

On a team writing effort where there is some comparative advantage among the authors, it is my view that as long as one member of the team has read the work, and it is that person who authors the text where the work is cited, that is sufficient.  Other team members can trust their teammate on this one.  (This usually works, although you can imagine the pitfalls that are possible.)   In a solo writing effort, if you cite a work that you haven't read, and you do so incorrectly, you run the risk of discrediting your own piece.  If you recall our little discussion today about detection, you might very well get away with it.  But then again, you might not.  If the purpose for the citation is to show that you've done your homework, then do your homework.  That is the simple message.

However, I will confess to, for example, taking a concept I know already, finding the Wikipedia page on the concept or some other generalist source, and then linking to it without reading the whole page thoroughly.  Sometimes Wikipedia has errors in it, so this practice is not without risk.  However, it is mostly benign.  I do it to show I'm not making the concept up, that I learned it ahead of time.

Regarding works that you don't understand, there are some famous works (Keynes' General Theory comes to mind) that are very difficult and hardly anybody understands them, but they were seminal in a line of thinking that followed.  Those works should be cited, with reverence.   Otherwise, it is quite a risky think to cite a paper you don't understand that others do understand, unless you are asking help from them to explain it to you.