Rachel Reeves plagiarism row puts publishers under scrutiny

The failure of Rachel Reeves’s publisher to pick up examples of apparent plagiarism in her new book has exposed the loose checks and lack of formal vetting among many top international book publishers.

The Financial Times on Thursday revealed that the UK shadow chancellor’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, contains more than 20 examples of text that appears to be taken from other works without acknowledgment.

“This is potentially very serious,” said Greg Hands, Conservative party chair, who pointed out that German cabinet ministers have been forced to resign due to allegations of plagiarism in doctoral theses.

Basic Books, an imprint of publishing giant Hachette, has admitted that factual sentences taken from primary sources should have been rewritten and properly referenced but this did not happen in every case.

Reeves’s office on Wednesday issued a statement denying plagiarism, but the shadow chancellor touched obliquely on the allegations at a book launch at the Institute for Government later that evening.

Reeves at a talk about the book on Thursday said it had an extensive bibliography but “not everything got in there”.

“I hold my hands up, it’s my book, my name on the cover, and there were things in the book that should have been properly referenced,” she said. 

Asked whether two other books she had authored contained “inadvertent mistakes”, the shadow chancellor said: “I’ve not had time to go through those books.” She added: “Writing this book while also doing this job was a challenge.”

Publishing executives have said that plagiarism is a tricky area for many groups, whose resources are stretched given the number of books being published compared with relatively thin editorial teams. 

Most of the time plagiarism was inadvertent and difficult to prove given the extent to which authors’ work is drawn from their experiences and reading, said one person who works in publishing. 

But executives at leading publishers admitted that few use the sort of software that is now being adopted by universities to spot plagiarism and AI-generated content. 

One said that companies instead rely on the honesty of their authors and skills of their editors in spotting anything that looks unusual or out of keeping with the rest of the author’s work. 

“Books have editors — they read the manuscript and they use their common sense,” he said. “We don’t do it any more formally but rely on authors to be honest and editors to see if something is not quite right. We don’t have a piece of software that checks as some universities do.”

Publishers also strike deals that contractually put the responsibility for fact checking on the author. An editorial director at a leading publishing house in the UK said an extra check for plagiarism can be requested when a book goes through its legal read.

“Contracts tend to have a clause stating that the author warrants that the work is wholly original and written by said author, apart from when otherwise stated.”

Nick Groom, a professor of English at the Macau university and researcher on authenticity and forgery who has written eight books, said: “An author is expected to check everything, not just by their readers but also by the publishers themselves.”

Jocelyn Hargrave, editor of Publishing Research Quarterly and lecturer in publishing at the Derby university, said the tight schedules of the publishing systems meant that “pressure on editors to get their work out is greater”.

She described the Reeves’s book as an “unfortunate, but instructive, reality check”, adding: “Plagiarism detection softwares are out there, but it often is a very costly exercise and it takes quite a lot of time. If the publishing schedule allows for that extra time, then those checks may occur, but usually through the manual checks, peer review, and the work that the publisher does with the author.”

Groom said that plagiarism checking software was not perfect “but it’s a very helpful way of indicating whether work has been lifted without acknowledgment. I don’t think publishers do put authors through Turnitin (a document plagiarism scanner) — and maybe they should”.

He said things will only get trickier with the rise of AI, which can scan and reproduce huge volumes of work.

But he added that publishers should be able to have confidence in the integrity of their writers. “They’re not students.”

The Conservatives on Thursday used the controversy to attack Reeves, who has worked with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to try and restore the party’s reputation for economic competence and win over business.

“As always Sir Keir and his Wikipedia shadow chancellor will take the easy way out every time,” said a party social media ad.

Plagiarism has been a long standing problem in political publishing. Stefan Weber, a “plagiarism assessor”, accused German politician Annalena Baerbock of copying parts of the book Now. How We Renew Our Country, published by Ullstein Verlag.

In a blog published in September 2021, Weber wrote that Baerbock had lifted passages from academics, government agencies and newspaper articles. He uploaded a digital version to Turnitin and identified a dozen copied passages.

Her lawyer rejected the accusation on her behalf.

Weber has also accused other European politicians of lifting material in books and dissertations they have published. 

“I have no idea why publishers don’t check their work with Turnitin. There is still not enough consciousness [of] this problem,” he said. “Plagiarism is rather widespread. There must be consequences for the writer.”