Category: ieee

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.

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

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:

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

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:

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

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.    

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

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:

Continue reading After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor

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:

Continue reading Meet the postdoc who says he’s been trying to retract his own paper since 2016

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.

In a statement, IEEE said:

Continue reading Publisher retracts nearly 50 papers at once