Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What the authors should have done was ... In the absence of an explicit directive or request from you, given that the authors are from a different culture, how do you expect them to know what was required by them? I don't mean to be snarky or accusative. Your comment was thoughtful, articulate and detailed, which tells me you are a sophisticated communicator.
It's a fair question. They were foreigners submitting to an American journal, so there is always the possibility for some sort of cultural misunderstanding in addition to any language difficulties. Nonetheless, the journal's submission process provides authors with a page listing ethical standards they have to follow, and it says that plagiarism of any form is not allowed. In fact, this journal's particular set of st…
But that said, I've often times wondered if this requirement of having to "rewrite in your own words" may do a lot of harm too. It obfuscates that things that people are talking about are actually exactly the same, or make it fuzzy what the exact differences are.
In a particular academic CS area I've witnessed people reproduce again and again the essentially identical description of setting and assumptions, but in being afraid of plagiarism accusations, they over and over re-formulate things which made it nonobvious that things are the same as from other authors or even from their own earlier work.