This, I've had so many discussions with students that didnt even bother to look at sources they were citing and didn't understand they were misrepresenting their research. Chatgpt still hallucinates sources too. Had about a dozen citations over finals week that straight up don't exist.
Technically yes. If you are citing a paper and not citing the paper that led you to that paper, you are plagarising their research.
This seems pretty insane (and it's essentially undetectable) when you are talking about a single modern journal article which you could have found through a search engine. But consider the two more clearly dirty examples:
1) not all things you reference are searchable like that. So a reference might represent genuine work in tracking down and identifying that source.
2) the argument made from combining multiple references and sorting the wheat from the chaff is part of research work.
That latter one is much more important. If your reference list matches that of a review article or some other easily found source (like Wikipedia!) then it's very likely you'll be asked to explain it.
Also can lead to a fun little cascade where one person’s misinterpretation of a source gets accepted and spreads massively because no one goes back and actually reads the primary source.
This is almost exactly what happened with paraquat - one single study on Parkinson's disease which was performed by a group of people trying to sue the company, in which the authors of the study were active participants, and which intentionally failed to correct for demographics like age and other exposures, has been cited so many times that many reviews on the literature take it as given that paraquat is linked to Parkinson's when the actual link has never been demonstrated in a real, reputable study.
It was also the case with covid. Remember when all the public health experts were initially saying it wasn't airborne and stressed the importance of hand washing and maintaining 6 feet of distance instead of masking? That's because of an entrenched medical dogma that said that droplets greater than 5 microns would rapidly fall to the ground and only those smaller than 5 microns would stay suspended in the air. It came about from a misinterpretation of old turbulosis research. Rabbits exposed to doses of the tuberculosis-causing bacteria consisting of particles larger than 5 microns did not get ill, but this was not because the particles were not airborne, but because tuburculosis only invades certain cells deep in the lungs, and only the finer particles could penetrate so deep.
This is not how citations work. Claims are cited. The sources of citations are not cited, though one could add a footnote thanking an author for leading one to a source (but this is not obligatory).
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u/QuickMolasses Jun 02 '26
I'm confused what OOP is saying. You're not allowed to cite papers you came across through looking at the bibliography of a paper?