In the Archives, Plagiarism & Rachel Reeves
Given events it may have been missed but Rachel Reeves latest volume on women economists is in the news. On the face of it this is a good thing. The world of finance and economics is dominated by white middle class men in suits, who often don’t take too kindly to a professional female presence. It is changing but not yet enough.
The issue with Ms Reeves book is not the principle but the practice. The FT casting an eye over it has found sections which are slightly rewritten bits of Wikipedia, speeches of others etc none of which are properly credited.
Reeves has noted that the book does have a large number of references and these are simply errors which will be corrected.
We all of course make errors, one of the reasons why books have Editors. Reeves is not an academic but a politician which in this case is just as well because plagiarism is worse in academia even than gross moral turpitude.
Its not really clear if Reeves wrote all or some of the book or if ghost writers were used, but certainly researchers were employed. This is not uncommon, particularly for large projects. David Olusoga for example no doubt relies on researchers for some material but is always, rightly, very careful to be shown in archives looking at some of the records he is talking about.
E P Thompson relied on a retired head teacher E E Dodds to look up some records for him in the National Archives and was careful to credit the research (and pay Dodds at an appropriate rate).
Archives particularly in the e-world and age of austerity are under threat but without them history can disappear.
As a research historian I regularly delve in archives and check sources. What appears under my name is always written, for better and sometimes worse, by myself. Other things appear which I have written but not under my name- trade union bulletins for example- but here I am expressing not my views but those of the union.
Of course politicians regularly use speech writers. Much of what appeared from Blair was written by Alistair Campbell and others. Starmer too has speech writers who should be congratulated for managing to make his speeches as dull as if he had written them himself. To be fair Starmer is still not as dull as Gordon Brown was.
The lesson for Rachel Reeves is that while its not expected that politicians speeches are all their own work, the same does not apply to books, particularly those claiming to have any kind of academic provenance. In this case it might have been better for others to write the book chapters and Reeves to provide an overarching introduction, written entirely by herself.
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