There are similar questions in my field, journalism and business writing, with added challenges of compression, readability and the presumption of writing for a general rather than specialist audience.

What I tend to read is on the rigorous end of popular history, so theoretical disputes and footnotes as signals are less common here (assumptions tend to be more embedded), but when the authors cite archives, I tend to presume that they have done the spadework themselves. Sometimes that’s a problem in and of itself: One of the areas I’m interested in is Central and Eastern Europe, where some post-Soviet archives that were open in the early and mid-90s are now closed. At some point you either trust the author or you don’t, and all the rest of the appartus is just there to enable the trust.

*Not original.

You chat about it a bit with colleagues, it feeds into some offhand remarks in your teaching, you meet the author at a conference and tell them how much you liked it. But you don’t do anything with the article, really, just file it away in the back of your mind.

Ten years later, you’ve moved on, you’re working in a new area, and it occurs to you that the article offers a nice parallel to what you’re doing now. A bit out of left field, has never been cited in this context before, but you can see a connection.

Are you really obligated to keep track of where you originally saw the article cited? That’s silly.

What if you saw it cited in multiple places, and it was the fact that it was so broadly influential that led one to read it? Would one want to cite a review, or all the reviews, that led one to decide to read a book?

It might work for a discipline that consisted entirely of highly specialized problems with hermetically sealed, linearly chronological, histories, in which everything relevant was always cited and each discussion was always in direct response to the immediately previous discussion. No notion of broad professional competence within the field. Is there such a discipline? Would anyone want to work in it?

On the other hand, I’d think that it was a matter of basic intellectual honesty not to cite something that one knew only indirectly without clarifying that one hadn’t read it for oneself. Same as if one uses a translation without being competent in the original language. It puts a limit on the level of trust that a reader should have.

I also wonder if “scholars … hav[ing] enough confidence to make those arguments without the safety net of invoking legitimating theorists or disciplinary canons” is simply a function of age and experience within a discipline. I can see people who feel professionally insecure feeling a need to cite, and thus borrow, extra authority. I would imagine that this perceived need recedes with time.

Most of the time I find material insufficiently footnoted, not overly. I do wish people wouldn’t use footnotes as a substitute for a bibliography, though.

On appearing to do work that one has not done, it seems to me that there is a difference between the work process of academia (studying, reading, thinking) and the work product of academia (published words). Copying published words steals labor twice over; pretending to have done work processes that one has not but producing useful knowledge nevertheless is a different kind of offense.