A career can be completely derailed by it. One must know how to cite correctly. We should distinguish two extremes of plagiarism. At one extreme is the theft of an entire grant proposal or manuscript, and submitting it as your own. At the other extreme is the occasional inclusion in your writing of a string of references obtained from a review and the uncited paraphrase or generalization.
Plagiarism is often a failure to use appropriate citation techniques.
From this point of view, plagiarism is simply the failure to cite the source of your information. The purpose of this handout is to acquaint graduate students with the need for correct citation practices, and to indicate some useful techniques of citation. What happens is that the writer, rather than synthesizing several sources for himself or herself, relies instead on the scholarship of one review or journal article as a source of both specific facts and generalizations. As a result, the writer becomes committed to the information, point of view and often the wording of the source. Another kind of plagiarism is autoplagiarism - using your own material without citing yourself.