Probably so. It is an interesting topic and I am not really ready to admit defeat. I started this little adventure yesterday as I was having a slow weekend.
“It has been a learning experience.” I think I have learned there is more to this than it seems.
Don’t you care mostly about whether it is legal in Saudi Arabia, then? Something few of us would know? It seems unlikely that you’d be extradited for writing term papers, even if it turns out it is illegal in half the US states.
Who says that in those disciplines it doesn’t? In fact, not only has “learning to write in an academically-correct manner” one of the purposes of term papers for any discipline, but with emphasis on form over function getting ever heavier, it’s even gaining importance.
Journal referees do reject papers over misspellings and bad grammar, after all, even in subject in which misspellings do not kill*.
Professor here. I won’t comment on the ethics, since you obviously don’t care. Your reference to “a real paper library” and your inability to do online research (and whatever mining Kindle refers to) indicate that you are profoundly incapable of writing anything that will pass as an academic paper.
Nope. A paper that is that bad probably would get rejected by the editor before even being sent to reviewers. You wouldn’t want to waste their time with a paper so sloppily written - sloppy writing implies sloppy thinking.
I’ve recommended rejection based on awful grammar, but it is rare, since most authors do better. This is engineering and computer science.
Depends on how pervasive the errors are and how much they obscure the content of the manuscript. On an otherwise interesting paper, I might recommend major revisions and an editor for English. For a submission that would be average or below for the journal, I’d probably recommend rejection and suggest that the authors aim for a lower profile journal if they want to resubmit.
There are also extreme cases in which the language makes it impossible to follow the scientific content. Functionally, a manuscript like that can’t be subjected to peer review. These submissions really shouldn’t even get to reviewers, but they sometimes do.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. Many of the journals I review for get copy edited anyhow. I’m talking about incompetence with English.
Also, you have to allow for the source. Many papers from India mangle American and British English in very similar ways. You can recommend a revision to clean up the grammar. But I’m on the program committee for a conference which takes place in India - those papers get a pass.
The very worst papers I’ve seen come from Russia. Badly written, illogical, and 20 years out of date. You’d think that Xerox machines were still banned there.
A company hiring consultants is not the same situation, professionally, academically, or ethically, as a student hiring someone to write a paper for them for school.
And the last sentence there sounds like you’re trying to use a loophole.
