An international computing society has begun retracting conference papers for “citation falsification” only months after the sleuth who flagged the suspect articles was convicted for defamation in a lawsuit filed by one of the offending authors.
So far, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has pulled at least 27 of the papers, but dozens more remain, according to Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, Switzerland, who raised concerns about the articles more than two years ago. Some of the proceedings allegedly include plagiarized works, while others are plagued by citation stuffing.
The retraction notices from September 10 state:
The authors have violated the ACM Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification by engaging in citation falsification by co-authoring works containing an extremely large percentage of unnecessary self-citations, including citations that were not used as references in the work.
“It’s good that ACM is beginning to clean up their scientific library,” Pirelli told us. “However, they have more work to do, especially if they ever plan on aligning with the industry standard” guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics.
“As it stands, it takes ACM more time to deal with problematic proceedings than it does for someone to organize a yearly edition of a conference with them, which is obviously not sustainable,” he added.
The society would not answer specific questions about the dubious conference proceedings. But Scott Delman, ACM’s director of publications, agreed “investigations take far too long to conduct” and said it was a “high priority” for the group to devote more resources to investigations.
Pirelli first reported the plagiarized conference papers to ACM in October 2022. He later flagged several more conference proceedings that contained exorbitant numbers of citations to the benefit of one or two of the conference chairs. Pirelli wrote about his findings in a blog post in January 2023 after ACM failed to respond to his concerns.
Half a year later, one of the conference chairs, Shadi Aljawarneh, a computer scientist at the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, sued Pirelli for defamation, as we reported in November 2023.
“This guy is suing me because … I uncovered his whole … scam association that was organizing a bunch of conferences that may or may not have even happened,” Pirelli told us at the time. “One of them was supposedly in Kazakhstan in a time when Kazakhstan was closed due to COVID.”
In June of this year, the court found for Aljawarneh. Pirelli is appealing the verdict and declined to comment on the case, but said the retractions confirm he “was right to report these papers.”
The reference lists of most of the suspect papers are dominated by works by Aljawarneh, who was among the chairs of all of the conferences, and his frequent coauthor Vangipuram Radhakrishna, a computer scientist at Vallurupalli Nageswara Rao Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering & Technology in Hyderabad, India. Radhakrishna chaired one of the conferences along with Aljawarneh and others.
One of the retracted papers, for instance, lists 31 articles by Aljawarneh and 51 by Radhakrishna, none of which are cited in the paper itself. Neither researcher replied to requests for comment.
”While we have seen a steady rise in cases over the years … the good news is that the total number and percentage of published papers that have been compromised by bad actors remains relatively small,” Delman said. “Most misconduct is identified prior to the publication stage, so in general the system is working as intended.”
Many of the questionable papers Pirelli identified have yet to be retracted, including one containing a user manual for a university IT system. The same is true of the allegedly plagiarized proceedings that Pirelli reported to ACM in 2022, although they received an expression of concern.
Delman would not comment on “any additional penalties that may be imposed on specific bad actors” but referred us to the group’s policies for such punishment, which include temporary publishing bans.
”Some of the public criticism we have received on sites like PubPeer is fair and some of it is not,” Delman said. “I do agree that investigations take far too long to conduct, and it is a high priority for ACM to address this by devoting more resources to investigations and the decision-making and appeals processes over the coming months to reduce the time it takes to post Expressions of Concern and Retraction Notices to warn the community of integrity issues related to published articles. We are also considering updates to some of our policies and procedures to accelerate and streamline decision-making, while ensuring due process for respondents to allegations.”
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