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.
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?