Unoriginal Research

Mining Bibliographies and Notes

This is the eighth in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.

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Jonathan Wolstenhome, “Cross Reference” image

“But that’s cheating!”

I’ve heard this response every single time I’ve taught a class in which I’ve discussed using other people’s bibliographies and notes to develop your own research. This isn’t surprising, given how thoroughly steeped in heavy anti-plagiarism messages American undergraduates tend to be.

Using other people’s notes and bibliographies is not cheating. It is not even taking unfair advantage. It is, in fact, how the whole system of academic research and referencing is supposed to work.

Plagiarism is using someone else’s words or work and presenting it as your own. Mining other people’s bibliographies and citations is a combination of a few things, first of which being that it’s a way of discovering what sources another scholar found useful.

Given the vastness of the information available out there in the world, this is more than a mere time saver. Researchers, as we saw in the previous article in this series, are known in part by the intellectual company they keep, and one of the ways they establish that company in the wide and decentered context of scholarly conversation is not merely to document their sources, but to document those sources where other people can take a look at them and see what they’ve been learning from.

Using someone else’s bibliography or notes to help develop your own set of sources is a lot like looking at guidebooks or online reviews when you’re planning a trip. You’re not taking the same trip or even attempting to follow in the footsteps of all those guidebook writers or people posting on Tripadvisor. You are, however, taking advantage of a collection of information assembled and shared by other people who have been interested in the same thing you’re interested in. As you sift through the travelogues, restaurant reviews, and opinion posts, you develop a sense for which writers are providing relevant and solid information and which ones don’t meet your needs or are merely venting about how the French unaccountably and persistently refuse to be American.

The same goes for academic research. It’s all a big conversation, as was also discussed in the previous post. Getting your bearings in any big new conversation or community takes a little time and effort, and most of all what it takes is observation, the time-honored Internet habit of lurking, which is to say reading without participating in the conversation yet (or possibly ever).

That’s what you’re doing when you read other people’s research and you begin to mine their citations and bibliographies. You’re getting the lay of the land and finding out what’s important, what’s not as important, what discussions are on fire right now, what topics aren’t being discussed as much, and which voices are getting amplified. Not only is this not cheating, it’s a vital form of research all its own.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to know what you’re looking at and what it has to offer.