Plagiarism is a very important issue in academia—far more important than in other contexts. This is a very different issue than copyright, which is about the law and perhaps money. Plagiarism is something else.
Plagiarism is about using the ideas or the expression of ideas of someone else without crediting them for it. (I was taught long ago that it also includes the organization of ideas, but I have never seen that really developed.) It is not a matter of using someone else’s idea or words, rather it is using them in an uncredited fashion. The exact same behavior—even the same exact case—can be meaningless and harmless in other contexts, but a major violation in a scholarly context.
There are two reasons for this.
First, academia is about what I call the scholarly conversation. This is where we build on the work of others, crediting them for their contributions and then extending, applying or refuting them. Because we are building on the work of others, they have already shown how, why, where and in what circumstances those ideas apply, what they put together to get there, and perhaps laid out some caveats and/or restrictions. We do not replicate all of that work ourselves, because they have already done it. Unless our specific goal is to replicate their work—in order to verify it, perhaps in a new context—we should not try to replicate it. Instead, we give our readers a shortcut, by letting them know where they can find that earlier work.
This allows readers to evaluate the validity of the foundations we are building upon by considering the credibility of those earlier scholars. There are people whom I respect so much that I would likely just accept their conclusions, without needing to go and investigate how they got there. There are people whose work I have previously found so problematic that I do not trust anything built upon it. But most scholars? Well, if I am unsure about the meaning or breadth or application of an idea, I might want to go and learn more about it. Citations to others’ work allow me, the reader, to evaluate the precursors to the work I am reading—and to do so in the fashion I choose.
Second, citing those who came before allows me to evaluate the scholar and work I am reading. If I can see that they know that they are building on the work of these previous scholars, I can better be assured that they have already considered or taken into account the issues that those previous scholars raised. I can see that they are, in fact, building on those other people’s work. This means that they should not be making mistakes already warned against, retreading on infertile ground, or simply doing more elementary work. If they show me that they already know that previous work, and how they are building on it, I can take them and their work more seriously.
More subtly, by citing previous scholars, I can usually see the disciplinary, methodological and substantive direction that a work is coming from. It helps me to understand the kinds of concerns that will be explored, the kinds of tools that might be brought to bear and the classes of themes that might be recognized. That is, it gives me notice of what schema I should be activating so that I can more easily make more sense of what I am reading and will get to in this work.
Now, both of these two reasons matter enormously for those with expertise to recognize and understand the citations in a work. They can seem like minor things to those who couldn’t make use of the citations for these sorts of purposes. But academic writing is aimed that just such an audience of experts. Obviously, this serves as a barrier to the larger public understanding academic work. This is why writing for the broader public is just so very different than writing scholarly works. But that is a different audience, and different audiences should be approached differently.
Clearly, neither of these two reasons really addresses the importance of correctly indicating when someone else’s words are being used. That is mostly about just politeness. But there is value in clear and/or efficient expression of an idea. We ought to give credit, rather than steal credit, for well crafted explanations of ideas. But in student work, including doctoral dissertations, there is another very important reason to be a stickler for properly crediting the expression of ideas. You see, explaining something in your own words is often how you show that you actually understand what something means, or why it is important. This is why when quoting an extended passage—even the best written extended passages—it is still important to explain its significance. Yes, this helps the reader to pick out the parts you mean to build on, but (perhaps more importantly), it shows the reader that you actually understand what you are referring to.
Because scholars in the academy therefore must be stringent on this issue with their students, it becomes incumbent upon them to model the behavior they expect from students in their own work. Even a mild paraphrase can be introduced with “As [scholar] explained,…” And, honestly, I would feel taken advantage of if someone took credit for my phrasings (which I am sometimes proud of). I am so accustomed to giving credit to others in the scholarly community, I expect others to do the same with me.
With all of these reasons to correctly indicate the sources of the words in a piece and the sources of ideas in that the piece builds upon, why not give proper credit and correctly indicate quotations? I can hardly think of a respectable reason, leaving just laziness and sloppiness—which are hardly decent excuses.
However, I would add that non-experts might not recognize when an expression is really just a standard way to explain an idea. In fact, most of my quantitative methodology classes focused a shocking amount of attention on how to explain in words what quantitative data, results and/or analysis signified. This was taken so seriously that if two people in the same class were give them same data, graph or statistical output, we could very easily independently write the exact same sentences to describe them, and our peers (and other experts) would immediately recognize what is—if not essentially boilerplate plate sort of language—the style what a particular group has been intentionally acculturated into using. I wish that my qualitative methodology courses were as careful about steering us clear of overstating or misstating what our data showed.
I would also add that this blog is not written in a scholarly fashion or for a scholarly audience. While I sometimes write with lots of citations, I do that much less here. Different form for a different audience, with different expectations. However, I try hard to attribute quotations properly, even here.