The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted more than 400 papers “due to violations of IEEE’s peer-review process policies” after “a comprehensive internal investigation.”
The papers formed the proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Cities and Systems Engineering from 2016 through 2018. All of the meetings were reported as being held in cities in China.
The retraction notices read:
After careful and considered review by a duly constituted expert committee, IEEE has retracted the proceedings of this conference from IEEE Xplore, including this article. IEEE no longer has confidence in the review mechanisms used by this conference to screen, review, and accept this article. IEEE concluded that the peer review process was inadequate.
At least one of the papers had already been retracted, apparently sometime in 2021, which now leads to a confusing but likely unintentional retraction of a retraction notice.
Steven Heffner, managing director of publications at IEEE, said in a statement:
In the academic publishing industry, we are always working to deliver quality content, and unfortunately sometimes need to address these issues. IEEE strives to continuously improve our quality controls. We are glad to see that the tools we have put in place to spot non-conforming articles are working.
Thanks to a mass retraction of more than 7,000 papers more than a decade ago, and thousands since then, IEEE is already responsible for nearly 10,000 retractions in our database – more than 25% of the 37,000-plus in total.
They are hardly the only publisher to have retracted hundreds of articles at once this year.
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Small fry and just the tip of the iceberg. The peer-review process has been rotten for a long time. Actually one could reasonably claim that the mainstream subsists on flawed refereeing and/or fabricated statistics. See https://weirdtech.com/sci/expe.html for a good “historical example”. The solution? Complete , detailed transparency, making the referee superfluous and shifting responsibility to the reader. Tough on the herd of sheep, if that’s what the so-called scientific community” wants to be.
“Thanks to a mass retraction of more than 7,000 papers more than a decade ago, and thousands since then, IEEE is already responsible for nearly 10,000 retractions in our database – more than 25% of the 37,000-plus in total.”
So why does anyone take the IEEE and its publications seriously at this point. One would think they and their publications would just be consigned to the “will publish any junk science that comes their way” category and be ignored by the serious scientific community.
Because other publishers publish just as much worthless nonsense than does IEEE.
William, the problem does not lie with those who retract, but with those who don’t.
IEEE has given enough time for those authors to extract values from those proceedings. There are so many such IEEE conferences, especially after the covid. Just look into your spam folder.
I bet many of those proceedings will have an expiring date on them. So you pay a flat fee to host an IEEE meeting, and IEEE wants your money, and to uphold its good status to keep collecting fees. This is the reason why tons of papers from years ago got retracted. I can go on and on, but I think you got the idea.
IEEE performs good enough, look at Atlantis Press….