The book has been criticized for being more reflective of the court politics in the Tang dynasty that compiled it, rather than the realities of the Jin dynasty itself. Despite Fang's team having at their disposal not only the
pre-existing Jin histories, but also a large body of actual Jin primary sources, it appears that the book was primarily based on Zang Rongxu's (臧荣绪) identically-titled
Jinshu from the
Southern Qi, and further incorporates material from fictionalized novels. The Tang historian
Liu Zhiji (661–721) accused the editors of generally selecting the sources that had the most vivid and compelling language, rather than the ones that were the most historically reliable. The collaborative nature of the project coupled with the rushed production time unsurprisingly leaves the book with a number of internal contradictions and editorial errors; such as misspelled personal and place names, draft-like and unpolished language, and "cross-references" to non-existent chapters that were presumably planned but never finished in time for publication. In spite of these shortcomings, the Book of Jin is recognized as the most important primary source for the Jin dynasty and Sixteen Kingdoms, because the pre-existing histories and other sources it was compiled from have all been lost – save for a few stray quotations in other works. ==Translations==