His books include True Grit: Classic Tales of Perseverance (2018), Encyclopaedia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768-2018), Britannica Brainbusters: Challenging Puzzles for the Curious-Minded (2015), and Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans (1998).
The Rockford Institute published Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans in 1994, and a revised and enlarged edition came out in 1998, with a Preface by Eugene Genovese.
The political scientist David J. Garrow wrote in evaluation of Pappas' preliminary article in Chronicle that "nothing can be gained by attempting to minimize or understate either the amount of King's plagiarism or the seriousness of the academic wrongdoing that it represented."
He continued that "those who are either uncomfortable with or downright hostile to King and the movement's larger political legacy," in particular Pappas, " are hard at work to amplify and emphasize" the pirating."
He was quoted in The Guardian as noting that "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection" but "that premise is completely unproven..." He continued that "with many of the pieces you don't know who it's written by, and who the administrators are...," and concluded that "hyperlinks, bulletpoints and cut-and-paste press releases do not an encyclopedia entry make.