Rachel Reeves has denied claims of plagiarism, after it emerged some passages of her new book were lifted from sources including Wikipedia. The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was launched at an Institute for Government event on Wednesday evening.
The Financial Times said its reporters had spotted more than 20 examples of apparent plagiarism in the book, including entire sentences and paragraphs. It said these mostly contained biographical information.
The BBC has checked the examples highlighted by the FT and found some material in the book was very similar to online sources. For example, a sentence about the relationship between author H.G. Wells and economist Beatrice Webb is identical to one on Ms Webb’s Wikipedia page.
Another paragraph about international aid under New Labour is very similar to a foreword written by Hilary Benn, who is now the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, on the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change website. Only a few words in the paragraph in the book differ from Mr Benn’s foreword.
Publisher Basic Books said: "When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. “We acknowledge this did not happen in every case. As always in instances such as these, we will review all sources and ensure any omissions are rectified in future reprints. At no point did Rachel seek to present these facts as original research.”
At the book’s launch event, which took place the evening before the Financial Times article was published, Ms Reeves was asked how she found the time to write it.
In response she said: “My day job is pretty consuming and I’ve got two primary aged children but I wanted to carve out time to write this book. In the acknowledgements I acknowledged the research assistants that I had, particularly on the facts and the detail that went into the pen portraits of the women that I speak about. And that came from a range of sources, from books, from interviews, from articles, from Wikipedia.”
Sloppy, very sloppy … and distasteful … I don’t like plagiarists … 