IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”
The case is just the latest involving the discovery of papers full of gibberish – aka “tortured phrases” – thanks to the work of Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, Cyril Labbé, of University Grenoble-Alpes and Alexander Magazinov, of Skoltech, in Moscow. The tool detects papers that contain phrases that appear to have been translated from English into another language, and then back into English, likely with the involvement of paper-generating software.
The papers were in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (232 articles), and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (118 articles), plus four editorials.
According to IOP’s Rachael Harper, head of marketing communications, 20 of the papers were listed in the Problematic Paper Screener:
Both volumes were submitted by the same conference organisers, representing the International Conference on Computing, Communication, Electrical and Biomedical Systems (ICCCEBS) 2021 and International Conference on Chemical, Mechanical and Environmental Sciences (ICCMES) 2021 respectively. Following reports from an anonymous whistleblower, along with detection of tortured phrases by the Problematic Paper Screener, we were concerned enough to launch investigations into two volumes. Our investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation. There has been no reasonable explanation from the conference organisers regarding either volume as to why these issues occurred.
Arulmurugan Ramu of Presidency University in Kolkata, India, who is listed as the contact person for both proceedings, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch.
Harper said that “indicators of the manipulation included:”
- Nearly all papers in both volumes contain more than one unrelated reference to the conference organiser’s work and others at the organiser’s institutions (many of whom are authors in the proceedings)
- Authors report having work accepted immediately and receiving no peer review reports
- High level of similarity between manuscripts
- Some papers have significant overlap with other papers published around the same time, by different authors
- Some papers contain tortured phrases, masking high levels of plagiarism
- Similarities in the content and format of peer review reports
Harper continued:
Following the investigation, we have put in place additional measures to prevent them from recurring. This includes automated checking of all articles for known tortured phrases and a new proceedings submission platform which gives us more detailed insight into the organiser’s management of the content. We continue to invest in capabilities to catch problematic content prior to publication.
IOP has had similar issues before, including a case that led to more than 20 retractions in 2020.
Update, 1430 UTC, 2/24/22: The “anonymous whistleblower” to whom the IOP refers was Nick Wise, an engineering graduate student at Cambridge who has identified problems in IOP publications before, Retraction Watch has learned.
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I’m confused.
Did the conferences actually take place? Were all the published works indeed presented at the conferences?
In fact, i just checked the university where the contact person of the proceedings listed. This is the first time I heard the name of Presidency University. But they don’t have a campus in Kolkata. See the link for computer science faculty at their Bangalore Campus (main campus). https://presidencyuniversity.in/school-of-engineering/computer-science/
This is strange….I think some investigations need to be initiated about the contact person.
Presidency College (known as Hindu College) was established back in 1830s. You probably have heard about the earlier name, when it was part of Calcutta University. Few years ago, Presidency was upgraded to a university, and they do have a campus (Presidency College campus) in Calcutta/Kolkata. But not sure what a Bangalore address is doing here.
There are just facts – nothing to do with the retraction or conference.
There is no fault with above conference series, I am also one of the author from above conference, The conference is take place as per procedure and rules and regulation of the basic conference process. We have received proper review comments and further revision process. We have made presentations and various chairs and keynotes are participated in the conference. Organizers also given proper time for post conference corrections.
After various observation our team found The IoP publisher is the major victim in this case, they only looking money from the organizers and authors. They not provide any basic supporting tools for the organizers and authors.
After post conference submission it is the responsibility of the publisher to verify all the contents. For steeling money from the authors the publisher accepting all the papers from the organizers and finally they blame the conference committee for useless reasons.
We verified all the publications in IoP website and requested all to verify the publications in IoP conference series, There are No single paper showing basic quality measures of the research paper. They keeping support with indexing agencies and Cope committee doing this kind of dreams to the world.
We highly recommended to the global authors to avoid this kind of Cheap publishers those who looking for money and not seeking quality in research.
If I understand you correctly, your paper was one of those retracted? Could you provide a link to that paper. I was unable to find it when searching with your name. Thanks.
I don’t remember a publisher leaving a proactive comment at Pubpeer before.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/6E48C97B769DBF8D6D1C201646FD59
“This article (and all others within the same proceedings volume) has been retracted by IOP Publishing following an extensive investigation in line with the COPE guidelines. This investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation. IOP Publishing respectfully requests that readers consider all work within this volume potentially unreliable, as the volume has not been through a credible peer review process.”
They enjoyed that so much, it seems that they decided to publish this PubPeer comment for every paper. Not content to pollute the scientific literature to begin with, they’ve polluted PubPeer too.
I’m not sure if I would consider it “polluting” to add those messages to PubPeer; many users seem to add such messages. Although, I admit the difference between IOP and Dr. Bik (for example), is that Dr. Bik usually provides both a quote of, and link to the retraction notice, instead of a short blurb.
At the end of the day, I think I’m glad that IOP now has an official account on PubPeer, no more excuse for papers languishing for 8 years without investigation.