ieee – Retraction Watch

Elsevier retracts the least and reinstates the most, new analysis finds

*Frequencies of reasons 10 publishers have given for retracting articles (source).*

While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.

“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”

Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.

Buying a first author slot can cost you anywhere from $56 to $5,600

The market for fake authorship on a research paper has prices to match every budget, according to a new dataset compiled from thousands of advertisements on social media platforms and paper mill websites.

The dataset, called BuyTheBy, is the first systematic attempt to understand the market for paper mill products, according to its creators. It compiles more than 18,000 text-based advertisements from seven paper mills operating across India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, collected at various points between March 2020 to April 2026. The researchers found prices vary widely depending on geography, ranging from $56 to $5,631 for a first author slot, according to a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Several of the advertisements appear to correspond with published papers subsequently published in the targeted journals, with identical titles to those advertised. But cracking down on the industry with datasets such as these will be difficult, some experts say, especially as the business model evolves rapidly with AI.

Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities’

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers retracted 57 articles on October 1 for inadequate peer review, according to the publisher.

The papers appeared in the journal IEEE Access between July and September of 2020. The journal is open-access, with a current article processing charge of $1,995. It appears to have published more than 10,000 articles so far this year.

The notices retracting each article were identical, and stated:

Elsevier investigating papers after IEEE finds ‘self-plagiarism’

Following a complaint from a reader, editors at the U.S.-based publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) determined the researchers behind two decade-old papers had committed “self-plagiarism,” charges the authors deny, Retraction Watch has learned.

However, IEEE passed the buck on to Elsevier, which published one of the articles a month after IEEE had published the other. Elsevier, in turn, said it is wrapping up its investigation and will make the conclusions public “once final.” And one of the authors said a corrigendum is in the works.

The studies share three authors, including last author Li-Qun Zhang, a professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science at University of Maryland School of Medicine, and both focused on movement of the knee as it relates to people with osteoarthritis.

Plague of anomalies in conference proceedings hint at ‘systemic issues’

Hundreds of conference papers published by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) show signs of plagiarism, citation fraud and other types of scientific misconduct, according to data sleuths.

“I am concerned that the issue with these particular conferences is widespread enough such that it indicates systemic issues with their peer review systems,” Kendra Albert wrote last August in an email to IEEE that Retraction Watch has seen.

Albert is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School and a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. On the side, Albert has been working with Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, to ferret out research misconduct using a computer system called the Problematic Paper Screener.

Publisher retracts 400 papers at once for violations of ‘peer-review process policies’

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:

‘This is really ridiculous’: An author admitted plagiarism. His supervisor asked for a retraction. The publisher said, “nah.”

Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.

Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.

Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.

The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:

IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.

We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.

We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:

“[T]hese shit comments”: Author of a nonsense paper responds on PubPeer

A conference proceedings for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a 2021 paper which appears to have been produced in part by the fake article generator SCIGen — an allegation the corresponding author denies.

“Estimate The Efficiency Of Multiprocessor’s Cash Memory Work Algorithms” appeared earlier this year in the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Smart Information Systems and Technologies, where it came to the attention of Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé.

As readers of this blog might recall, Cabanac, Labbé and their colleague Alexander Magazinov recently wrote a preprint about how mangled translations into English — “tortured phrases,” in their words — can indicate that an article has been churned out by a paper mill.

After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor

Nearly two years after a doctoral student hanged himself in a building on the campus of the University of Florida, in Gainesville, his supervisor has been placed on paid leave, a move that follows a report released last month that found evidence of misconduct at three different computing conferences.

Huixiang Chen was found dead in June 2019, while working in the research group of Tao Li, a computing engineer. A few months before his suicide, Chen wrote a paper for a prestigious, annual conference in computing, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, or ISCA, which is one of the three mentioned in the report.

Chen’s paper was accepted, but his death, before the conference began, sparked allegations that the peer-review process had been unfairly compromised and that Li had coerced his student to publish faulty results. The University of Florida launched an investigation into the circumstances of Chen’s death shortly after his suicide, but those findings have not been publicly released.

Li did not respond to requests for comment. The report on the conferences, released February 8 by a “joint investigative committee” from two organizations that sponsored the ISCA meeting, reached four main conclusions, starting with:

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