[lamerose]

I think this can result from cases where paraphrase isn't useful but still culturally expected. For example, you often need to introduce the central point of another paper before you can comment on it, and the ideal way to do that would be to insert the whole abstract verbatim, but people look down on that. So, you end up writing a paraphrase as faithful to the original as possible while still being superficially different. If you're good at English, you can paraphrase in a way that flows well and displays your understanding. ESL writers might be at risk of screwing the wording up, not noticing, and getting ridiculed for poor research.

[blt]

Inserting the abstract verbatim is very far from ideal. That would usually cause you to repeat a lot of information from your own paper's introduction and then fail to hone in on the precise reason you're citing the paper.

Summarizing another academic work in the context of your own work is a bedrock activity in academic thinking as well as writing. Nobody should rely on a tool to do that.

[lamerose]

I admit a scenario in which you have to communicate everything that the abstract communicates is kinda contrieved, though it could happen if the article is the main target of your discussion. But in general, pointless paraphrase of other sources is widespread.

>Summarizing another academic work in the context of your own work is a bedrock activity in academic thinking as well as writing.

Summary has its place, but paraphrase is another thing. Quality of paraphrase is defined by surface-level features like vocabulary, grammar, and re-arrangement of sentences, and second-language English education often fails to advance beyond word-by-word substitution. Even when the exercise of paraphrase demonstrates some kind of understanding of the original text on the part of the author, it doesn't necessarily aid the reader.

I'm not trying to deny that tortured phrases may also indicate paper farming and plagiarism btw, just saying that there are other factors.

[awkward]

I think the term here is plaigarism. Changing random words and shuffling clauses around so the auto checker doesn't flag it while keeping the sentence by sentence structure of someone else's work.