Plagiarism poses two challenges to the scholarly conversation:

It operates as a major breach of trust, casting a cloud of doubt around future work.
It obscures the complicated history of an idea, making it harder for others to build on your work.

Bans on plagiarism can be found in the ethical guidelines of many scholarly and professional organizations. For example, the Council of Science Editors categorizes plagiarism as a form of "research misconduct." And the Chartered Financial Analyst Association characterizes plagiarism as professional "misrepresentation" that can have professional and financial consequences.

A few examples of the consequences of plagiarism (click to read more):

Plagiarism seriously undermines the credibility of research and its potential to foster new ideas and help people.

In actuality, most forms of plagiarism are a symptom of a much bigger problem: the difficulty of properly using and citing source material. Relatively few cases of plagiarism are deliberate transgressions, like a student turning in a paper written by someone else. More often it is something murkier. In a cultural climate of sampling, reposting, and re-blogging, the distinction between unintentional plagiarism and engaging properly with source material is not as easy as it sounds. Accidental plagiarism can happen in any field.