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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 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:
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.
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:
In August 2015, bioengineers gathered in Milan, Italy, for the 37th annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. About 2,000 papers were accepted and published online for the conference. But an author of one of those articles says he’s been trying to retract it since 2016.
As a PhD student at the Université de Lorraine, in France, Khuram Faraz worked with professors Christian Daul and Walter Blondel on the processing of biomedical images, mainly for dermatology. Faraz is listed as a co-author on a paper titled “Optical flow with structure information for epithelial image mosaicing,” which was published at the 2015 conference. The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
A few months after the conference, in January 2016, Faraz emailed Daul and Blondel about his concerns with the study, according to emails that Faraz shared on PubPeer last June. Faraz allegedly told Daul and Blondel that, for a specific method used in the paper, called RFLOW:
A year after retracting 29 papers in one fell swoop, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a scientific society which is also one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, is retracting 49 articles from a journal and a conference because of problems in the way they were peer reviewed.
