Jane Goodall is getting the wrong kind of attention for her
new book. She lifted a few passages nearly word-for-word from
Wikipedia, but failed to attribute them.
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
PUBLISHED: 09:32 EST, 20 March 2013 | UPDATED: 09:43 EST,
20 March 2013
One of the world's leading chimpanzee experts has been
accused of plagiarism after entire passages from Wikipedia and
other websites appeared in her latest book without proper
accreditation.
Dame Jane Goodall's new book 'Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and
Wonder From the World of Plants', was shown to contain a
minimum of 12 passages borrowed from a variety of websites.
However the respected British primatologist failed to
include proper attribution, or footnotes.
The similarities were spotted by a botany expert who had
been invited by The Washington Post to review the book and
raised the alarm.
Among the suspicious passages is a discussion of
sustainable tea farming in which Goodall writes: 'According to
Oxfam, a British nonprofit agency working to put an end to
poverty worldwide, the spraying of pesticides on tea estates
is often done by untrained casual daily-wage workers,
sometimes even by children and adolescents.'
However the website of Choice Organic Teas, a company which
donates a slice of its profits to the Jane Goodall Institute,
carries exactly the same paragraph word for word.
Another excerpt from the book reads: 'Bartrams Boxes, as
they came to be known, were regularly sent to Peter Collinson
for distribution to a wide list of European clients.'
Meanwhile a suspiciously similar entry on Wikipedia
reading: 'Bartrams Boxes as they then became known, were
regularly sent to Peter Collinson every fall for distribution
in England to a wide list of clients.'
Seeds of hope, which was co-authored by Gail Hudson, who
worked on two of Goodall's previous books, is due out next
month.
In an email to the Washington Post Goodall said she would
she would correct future editions and raise the issue for
discussion on the Jane Goodall Institute Web site blog.
She wrote: 'This was a long and well researched book and I
am distressed to discover that some of the excellent and
valuable sources were not properly cited, and I want to
express my sincere apologies.
'I hope it is obvious that my only objective was to learn
as much as I could so that I could provide straightforward
factual information distilled from a wide range of reliable
sources.'
Dame Jane spent 45 years studying the social interactions of
great apes in Tanzania, and founded her institute in 1997.
By Steven Levingston, Published: March 19
Jane Goodall, the primatologist celebrated for her
meticulous studies of chimps in the wild, is releasing a book
next month on the plant world that contains at least a dozen
passages borrowed without attribution, or footnotes, from a
variety of Web sites.
The borrowings in Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From
the World of Plants range from phrases to an entire paragraph
from Web sites such as Wikipedia and others that focus on
astrology, tobacco, beer, nature and organic tea.
Goodall wrote Seeds of Hope with Gail Hudson, who has
contributed to two other books by the 78-year-old naturalist.
Hudson is described on
literati.net as a newspaper
and magazine editor, freelance writer, former spirituality
editor for Amazon.com and longtime devotee of organic foods
and holistic living.
This was a long and well researched book, Goodall said in
an e-mail, and I am distressed to discover that some of the
excellent and valuable sources were not properly cited, and I
want to express my sincere apologies. I hope it is obvious
that my only objective was to learn as much as I could so that
I could provide straightforward factual information distilled
from a wide range of reliable sources.
Goodall said she will discuss the issue on her Jane Goodall
Institute Web site blog and will correct future editions.
The books publisher, Grand Central, said in an e-mail it
was surprised to hear of the assertions. It added: We have
not formulated a detailed plan beyond crediting the sources in
subsequent releases.
Hudson said she had no comment.
Goodall joins a list of famous authors who have recently
faced questions about material they included in their work.
Often, the cause is speed and sloppiness in the research,
sometimes performed by co-authors and abetted by technology
that allows a writer to swiftly transfer passages from one
place to another and just as swiftly to forget it was done.
An expert in botany invited by The Washington Post to review
Seeds of Hope noticed some of the echoed passages, notified
theeditors and declined the assignment.
In Seeds of Hope, Goodall has crafted a passionate
narrative about plants, their effect on our lives and her
desire to preserve the natural environment. Her first-person
reflections are full of her well-known charm and
humanitarianism. It is when the book moves away from Goodalls
own stories to deliver background information on plants and
their history that the instances of borrowing creep in.
Goodall, whose reputation was founded on observations of
chimps in Tanzania, acknowledges early in the book that her
training in botany is limited. I have spent a lifetime loving
plants, she writes, even though I have never studied them as
a scientist.
In the book, Goodall extols the benefits of sustainable
farming. She expresses her shock at learning of dangerous
conditions for workers who harvest tea.
According to Oxfam, she writes, a British nonprofit
agency working to put an end to poverty worldwide, the
spraying of pesticides on tea estates is often done by
untrained casual daily-wage workers, sometimes even by
children and adolescents.