Be prepared for article spinning.
Article spinning is an increasingly-popular technique for creating plagiarized scholarly articles that plagiarism-detection software doesn’t always catch. It involves using software to copy and rephrase a published scholarly to create a new article. Terms and phrases in the source article are replaced with synonymous ones. Here’s an example.
The first of the two articles below is the original one. The second one duplicates much of the content using the “article spinning” technique, replacing words and phrases with synonymous words and phrases.
Zai, M. A. K. Y., Ansari, M. K., Quamar, J., Husain, M. A., & Iqbal, J. (2010). Stratospheric ozone in the perspectives of exploratory data analysis for Pakistan atmospheric regions. Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 6(1), 45-49.
Mian, K., Abbas, S. Z., Kazimi, M. R., Rasheed, F. U., Raza, A., & Iqbal, S. M. Z. (2015). Study heftiness in the astrophysical turbulence at Pakistan air space. European Academic Research, 2(12), 15697-15709.
Example
Here’s an example, showing the original article first, followed by the spun one.
The original (2010) article.
The copied (2015) article.
Text of example (original article):
(b) For normal data, the sample mean and variance are the unbiased estimators of location of the underlying distribution. Most physical data sets are not normally distributed even after transformation, because the assumption of an underlying normal distribution is a mathematical idealization that is never met exactly in practice because large data sets inevitably contain outliers.
Text of example (spun article):
(c) For Gaussian data, the example nasty and alteration are the unbiased estimators of location of the Gaussian distribution. Greatest bodily information circles are not Gaussian distributed smooth after alteration, since the supposition of Gaussian distribution is a exact romanticism that is not ever encountered precisely in repetition since big data groups unavoidably cover outliers [10].
Note how the phrase “sample mean” was converted to “example nasty” and the phrase “mathematical idealization” was changed to “a exact romanticism,” altering the meaning in both cases. There are numerous other cases of “spun” paragraphs in the article; in fact; it appears that most of the article is unoriginal and spun from the earlier one.
I am informed but cannot confirm that the listed second (and corresponding) author of the spun article, S. Zeeshan Abbas, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Karachi largely because of the publication of the spun article in European Academic Research.
Euro-trash.
European Academic Research, where the spun article is published, is an extremely low-quality journal included on my list of questionable journals. Its co-editor-in-chief is Ecaterina Patrascu, a Romanian I reported on last year when she and her associates launched the ridiculous journal American Research Thoughts.
I think European Academic Research is just another of Patrascu’s money-making schemes, and the journal’s publication of this rubbish article is evidence of that. Note that European Academic Research, including the bogus article described here, is indexed in Google Scholar, the world’s largest index of junk science.
Also, the spun article’s title — “Study heftiness in the astrophysical turbulence at Pakistan air space” — is nonsense.
Another complication: The Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, where the original article appeared, is published by a firm called Lifescience Global, a publisher also included on my list. On the journal’s “Previous issues” page, most of the links to earlier volumes and issues do not work properly and lead only to advertising, meaning most of the journal’s earlier content is lost, and many who paid to publish in the journal were ripped off. I accessed the 2010 article discussed here through an archived copy in Research Gate.
Article spinning is chiefly used as a dishonest tool for search engine optimization (SEO). There are software packages and websites that will spin text for free in some cases. Its use as described here is a re-purposing of the technique and offers researchers a way to get scholarly publications without having to do any real work.
