Rachel Reeves’s mea culpa over her failure to properly reference some sentences in her new book has thrown the spotlight on the thorny issue of plagiarism and the pitfalls of tedious factchecking.
Publishers and authors agree that if your name is on the book cover, the responsibility to properly reference any borrowed phrases or facts in the bibliography lies squarely with you.
“One thing that is quite curious,” one publishing insider said of the industry, “is that there doesn’t seem to be much formal factchecking. The author warrants to deliver something that is original, not plagiarised. It’s in the contract.” The publisher, they added, “is taking it on trust”.
Reeves acknowledged making mistakes after the Financial Times examined her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, and found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appeared to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment. The sources cited by the FT included an obituary from the Guardian, several Wikipedia entries and a passage from a fellow Labour frontbencher, Hilary Benn.
It raises the question: how widespread are such mistakes in the pressured, deadline-driven publishing industry?
“I’d say quite unusual,” said the source. “But I also imagine most books do not have the scrutiny that Rachel Reeves’s book had. You would have to know what you were looking for.”
The social historian David Kynaston, whose latest book, A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 was published in September, said the buck stopped with the author over factchecking. But, he added, all authors faced difficulties over what he described as “mini-plagiarism”.
“Rachel Reeves, a very busy person, was obviously employing researchers, I would think. I essentially do pretty much all my own research, but I can imagine you might employ someone to be a factchecker. Because checking facts, even in the age of the internet, when it’s a lot quicker than it used to be, is still quite a tedious and time-consuming business.”
Kynaston said he thought there were degrees of plagiarism, from replicating whole chunks of someone else’s work, to lifting a sentence or two, down to using the same verb or adjective seen elsewhere because there is simply no better word to use.
“If you’re writing survey-type books – and Rachel Reeves’s book is across quite a long span – then the more you rely on other people’s work rather than your own research, the more potentially it is a problem.
“I suspect what’s happened is she had a researcher who has handed over stuff, and given the impression it’s more what the researcher has come up with rather than them just copying and pasting it from Wikipedia. But, if the author’s name is on it, the author’s name is on it.”
The economic historian Robert Skidelsky, an emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick whose book The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning is due out next month, said there were several reasons why plagiarism occurred.
“Intention to deceive and pretend a good phrase is your own; laziness, not bothering to find your own form of words, but not really with any intention; pressure of time under deadlines when it’s often easy to not check references properly; note-taking and/or relying on research assistants’ notes who are not skilled and transfer their transcription of something into your text.”
The problem Reeves faced now, he said, “is that it is a distraction from the important thing she is talking about. And for anyone in public eye, if anyone wants to stick the knife in, this is a way of doing it. It may be in the end it all turns out to be completely innocent, and I’m sure it is in this case. But something sticks.”
Reeves is not the only politician to have faced such an accusation. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, when Germany’s defence minister, was cleared of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis after being accused of copying several passages without attribution by a law professor who published his findings online.
The US senator Rand Paul faced allegations over speeches and a book, while the former potential presidential hopeful Ben Carson apologised for plagiarising parts of his 2012 book.
