The scientific fraud behind the IEEE’s prestige

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, universally known as the IEEE, is one of the world’s most authoritative scientific and professional organisations in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science and telecommunications. It has over 533,000 members in around 190 countries, publishes some of the most important scientific journals in these fields and helps to define fundamental technological standards, such as those governing the operation of Wi-Fi and Ethernet networks. Its digital library, IEEE Xplore, contains over seven million documents and is one of the main resources for researchers and engineers worldwide. In disciplines such as computer science, where the most significant findings are often first presented at conferences, an IEEE publication can have a decisive impact on a scientist’s career. The Society’s prestige reflects the contribution it has made for over a century to technological development and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. 

Yet, for over twenty years, this very institution has been at the centre of a staggering succession of scandals concerning the quality and authenticity of scientific publications, particularly those produced through its vast conference network. Thousands of articles have been retracted; conferences have featured non-existent or unreliable peer-review procedures; scientifically nonsensical papers have been accepted and published; and an organised market for the sale of fake scientific authorship has even emerged. The latest incident was reported by Nature on 30 October: the IEEE withdrew 1,417 articles in a single day, after an independent investigation had documented their links with commercial organisations specialising in the buying and selling of scientific publications (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03455-8).

This affair should finally convince us to abandon the notion that the crisis of integrity in scientific publications is primarily a biomedical issue. The particular focus on fraud in medical and biological research – understandable given its potential consequences for public health – risks obscuring what is happening in the rest of the research community. In the case of the IEEE, the production of unreliable scientific publications has taken on industrial proportions within a system involving conference organisers, academic institutions and companies specialising in the fabrication of articles. The fact that such a prestigious organisation has taken decades to tackle the phenomenon seriously makes the affair all the more serious.

One of the first signs of this dates back to 2005, when three students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Max Krohn – developed SCIgen, a programme capable of automatically generating computer science articles by assembling technical terms, formulas, graphs and bibliographical references. The result looked like a normal scientific paper, whilst the content was completely nonsensical. One such article, entitled ‘Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy’, was accepted, without peer review, by the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, a conference supported by the IEEE. The experiment demonstrated just how easy it was to secure acceptance for a scientifically meaningless manuscript. The IEEE subsequently withdrew its support for the conference, and the case attracted considerable international attention (https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414).

In December 2008, an article produced using SCIgen and attributed to a non-existent researcher, Herbert Schlangemann, was accepted by the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering in Wuhan, China, sponsored by the IEEE. The paper, entitled "Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce", even appeared in the IEEE Xplore digital library. The organisers invited its fictional author to chair a scientific session, based on an equally fabricated CV. The article was removed after the story became public. The experiment had demonstrated that it was possible to get non-existent results published by exploiting the lack of adequate scientific checks (https://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/).

In 2014, the French researcher Cyril Labbé, who had developed tools to automatically recognise articles produced using SCIgen, identified over 120 nonsensical papers distributed by IEEE and Springer. A significant proportion of these originated from conferences organised in China between 2008 and 2013. The story made the pages of Nature once again, with an article documenting how automatically generated publications had entered the mainstream scientific literature. The problem had by then gone beyond the scope of a demonstration experiment: some people were using these publication systems to build up scientific CVs that could be used within their own institutions (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763).

In June 2015, Retraction Watch discovered that the IEEE had retracted thousands of conference papers, the majority of which had been published just a few years earlier. There were 1,281 retractions from the 2011 International Conference on E-Business and E-Government alone; a further 1,085 related to the International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering held in the same year. The IEEE had also removed the proceedings of numerous other conferences from its digital library, deeming the procedures used to select the papers to be inadequate. The retraction notices, which were generally identical, cited generic breaches of the society’s editorial principles, without providing adequate individual explanations. Overall, a problem emerged involving thousands of articles and entire scientific events (https://retractionwatch.com/2015/06/25/one-publisher-appears-to-have-retracted-thousands-of-meeting-abstracts-yes-thousands/).

That episode could have been seen as an opportunity to radically overhaul the organisation of conferences. The succession of scandals demonstrates just how inadequate the measures taken have been. In 2018, the IEEE announced the retraction of 29 articles from the journal IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility, after ascertaining systematic breaches of its peer-review rules, and dismissed three editors involved. Twenty-six of the retracted articles were authored by the Italian engineer Antonio Orlandi, a former editor of the journal, without the IEEE publicly clarifying individual responsibilities regarding each paper. This was therefore an incident that also involved one of the society’s scientific journals and its internal editorial control mechanisms (https://retractionwatch.com/2018/11/22/engineering-prof-in-italy-earns-26-retractions-in-one-fell-swoop/).

In December 2022, the IEEE retracted over 400 papers from the 2016–2018 editions of the International Conference on Smart Cities and Systems Engineering, held in China, stating that it could no longer have confidence in the peer-review mechanisms adopted by the organisers. The measure affected entire conference proceedings, as the investigation had established that the procedures used to select the papers were inadequate (https://retractionwatch.com/2022/12/06/publisher-retracts-400-papers-at-once-for-violations-of-peer-review-process-policies/).

In June 2023, Retraction Watch documented a further set of anomalies in IEEE conferences, reported by Guillaume Cabanac and Kendra Albert. Among the published manuscripts were texts containing plagiarism, manipulated citations and scientific terms distorted by automatic paraphrasing programmes. In an article on the identification of lung cancer using machine learning, for example, a computational technique known as ‘random forest’ – which uses numerous decision trees to classify data – had been transformed into ‘arbitrary backwoods’, an expression devoid of technical meaning. A researcher interviewed anonymously also recounted how, at his institution, papers submitted to a conference sponsored by the IEEE could be assessed by colleagues from the same university, which was also the main source of the work to be published. The potential to inflate the institution’s publication figures and manipulate the organisers’ citation figures was evident. IEEE still maintained that its preventive controls were highly effective (https://retractionwatch.com/2023/06/15/plague-of-anomalies-in-conference-proceedings-hint-at-systemic-issues/).

In November 2024, Retraction Watch reported that the IEEE had retracted a further 57 articles from the journal IEEE Access, as they had been accepted without the minimum number of independent peer reviews required by the editorial guidelines. The articles had been published in 2020, and their removal therefore took place four years later. The same investigation documented how Cabanac had progressively identified an increasing number of suspicious publications in the journal using his own automated system for detecting textual anomalies (https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/15/engineering-publisher-pulled-57-papers-in-a-day-for-peer-review-irregularities/).

A study published in 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focusing on organisations that facilitate scientific fraud on an industrial scale, subsequently analysed approximately 2.3 million papers published at nearly 20,000 IEEE conferences since 2003, identifying 45 conferences held between 2009 and 2011 in which more than 10 per cent of the papers had been retracted. The researchers also identified conferences characterised by statistically anomalous concentrations of papers flagged on PubPeer – a platform where scientific publications are critically discussed – and of papers containing technical expressions altered by paraphrasing programmes. In at least seven conference series, the anomalies recurred for three or more consecutive years. These findings suggest that the problem may have persisted within the same organisational networks for years, without checks being able to put a stop to it (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122).

The scale of this publishing disaster is even more striking when one considers that, according to the study published in October 2026 by Anna Abalkina and colleagues, IEEE accounted for 34 per cent of retractions indexed in Scopus between 2001 and 2024. In the same study, a review of the Retraction Watch database as at 29 June 2026 attributed 15.5 per cent of all recorded retractions to IEEE, placing it in second place amongst publishers. These percentages are calculated from different archives and do not directly measure the proportion of fraudulent publications by IEEE, but they do document the exceptional position the organisation has assumed in the history of scientific retractions (https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727). 

This series of incidents should suffice to demonstrate that the problem concerns the model for the production and distribution of scientific articles adopted by the IEEE for a significant part of its activities. The organisation sponsors more than two thousand conferences each year, producing around 350,000 conference papers. The most prestigious conferences, particularly in computer science, play a fundamental scientific role and may have extremely rigorous selection procedures. The IEEE brand, however, also encompasses a very different sphere, consisting of conferences organised locally by universities and associations, which may be granted technical sponsorship. In this system, the selection of manuscripts is entrusted primarily to the organising committees, whilst IEEE provides institutional recognition and, where papers are accepted, distribution via IEEE Xplore.

The distinction between scientific sponsorship and editorial responsibility has thus become particularly advantageous. Local organisers collect participation fees, authors secure a publication that is recognised in bibliographic databases, and IEEE expands its catalogue. There are various financial arrangements, including those in which IEEE units participate directly in any financial surpluses from conferences and those in which they receive fees for technical sponsorship. The official IEEE rules stipulate, for technically co-sponsored conferences without financial participation from the organisation, a fee of $1,450 plus $22 for each paper submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore. These sums are explicitly intended to cover the costs of the service and do not guarantee publication of the work. However, the same rules assign technical sponsors the responsibility of supervising the peer-review procedures: delegating the work to local committees, therefore, does not absolve them of responsibility for its quality (https://events.ieee.org/planning-basics/getting-started/obtaining-sponsorship/).

The financial figures are easily verifiable. In its audited financial statements for 2025, the IEEE reported $229.8 million in revenue from conferences, in addition to $321.5 million from periodicals, out of a total of $665.8 million in operating revenue. Direct costs for conferences in the same year amounted to $229.5 million, whilst in 2024 conference revenue had exceeded the costs attributed to that activity by more than $44 million. These figures demonstrate the sector’s significance within the organisation’s economy and the extent to which fluctuations in its financial performance are significant. The growth in the number of conferences and published papers nevertheless represents a commercial opportunity for the stakeholders involved in the system, whilst the investment required to properly evaluate each manuscript constitutes a cost. In the absence of adequate independent checks, the conflict between the volume of publications and scientific reliability is inherent in the very functioning of the system (https://2025.ieeeannualreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Institute-of-Electrical-and-Electronics-Engineers-Inc.-2025-FS-FINAL.pdf).

Added to this commercial interest is that of institutions, which use the number of publications to evaluate their researchers. The phenomenon has taken on recognisable geographical characteristics, reflecting differences between local career systems and the incentives attached to scientific output. In India, where a particularly high proportion of the IEEE conferences covered by the investigations have been held in recent years, the regulations of many institutions place value on publication in proceedings indexed by Scopus and other databases, a key requirement for CVs, career progression and institutional evaluations. Some even provide cash rewards. The regulations that came into force in November 2024 at the Marri Laxman Reddy Institute of Technology and Management in Hyderabad, for example, provide for an incentive of 10,000 rupees for the first author and 8,000 rupees for the second author of a paper published in the proceedings of an international conference indexed by Scopus, subject to the conditions laid down by the institute. A contribution towards registration fees is also provided. These incentives are formally aimed at promoting high-quality research; however, they assign an easily measurable economic value to https://www.mlritm.ac.in/themes/custom/mlritm/includes/Policies/23.Final%20R%26D%20Policy%20-%2003-11-2024.pdf.

The result is a market in which the production of articles becomes profitable for parties with differing interests. A conference can boost its revenue by accepting more registrations; a department can improve its performance indicators by increasing the number of publications by its members; a researcher can buy a place amongst the authors, particularly when the cost of doing so is lower than the expected career benefit. Paper mills operate within this system by offering a commercial service that exploits the publisher’s prestige and the weakness of controls. The presence of many problematic papers at conferences organised in a particular region does not, of course, justify labelling research from that region as fraudulent. However, it does indicate a concentration of financial opportunities and institutional vulnerabilities that must be investigated and rectified.

The investigation that led to the October decision is particularly significant precisely because it maps out this market. Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová and their colleagues collected 4,407 advertisements offering positions to scientific authors, published on over 200 social media channels, including Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook. By cross-referencing the titles on offer with the IEEE archives, they identified 2,062 articles, published between 2021 and 2026 in the proceedings of 366 conferences, which corresponded exactly or almost exactly to the papers offered for sale. The articles involved over 7,500 authors affiliated with more than 2,000 institutions across 56 countries. At some conferences, the identified papers accounted for up to 23.5 per cent of the publications. Of the 109 conferences with at least five articles linked to the advertisements, as many as 95 had been held in India (https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727).

The prices help to illustrate how the scheme works. A first-author position could be offered for sums ranging from 43 to 400 dollars, whilst a last-author position could cost between 11 and 200 dollars. The correlation between the advertisements and the published articles is a very strong indication of the commercialisation of scientific authorship, although the mere presence of an offer does not prove that every transaction was completed or that every result contained in the article was fabricated. The falsification of authorship, however, constitutes a breach of scientific integrity. The authors of the study also documented anomalies in collaborations, the distribution of affiliations and citations, consistent with an organised system of commercial production and distribution of articles.

The IEEE responded by retracting 1,417 of those papers en masse on 23 October. At the time of the Nature article, 1,622 of the 2,062 papers identified by the investigation had already been retracted, whilst the total number of retractions carried out by the IEEE during 2026 was approaching 3,000. The speed with which an external report was translated into an editorial decision is encouraging. The IEEE had already carried out large-scale retraction operations in the past; the key difference this time concerns the identification of a commercial network offering scientific authorship and the scale of the response to evidence gathered by independent investigators (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03455-8).

However, the quantitative defence put forward by the company remains baffling: it claims that the papers affected by the latest operation account for less than 0.06 per cent of all conference publications produced over the six-year period in question. This reasoning is statistically unsound: the papers were identified through a specific series of advertisements, which does not constitute a random sample of IEEE output and does not allow for an estimate of the overall frequency of fraud. Comparing the number of articles identified as problematic with millions of publications, in order to suggest that the phenomenon is negligible, confuses the ability to detect the problem with its prevalence. The thousands of retractions in previous years, the editorial checks that have repeatedly proved inadequate, and the existence of a public market for the sale of scientific authorship render this reassurance particularly implausible.

The October action is therefore a sign that deserves recognition, but the IEEE’s track record remains extremely poor. For over twenty years, there have been documented cases of gross fraud, conferences with unreliable peer-review procedures and entire batches of publications subsequently retracted. Meanwhile, these articles have had an impact on careers, academic rankings and subsequent publications that cited them. Retraction formally invalidates their scientific validity; it often comes after the benefits gained from those publications have already been reaped.

The IEEE’s responsibility therefore requires measures affecting the entire conference system: independent audits of scientific committees, traceability of peer reviews, preventive checks on authors and manuscripts, suspension of conferences that fail to demonstrate reliable procedures, and retrospective reviews of conferences where anomalous concentrations of publications are identified. The results of the investigations should be communicated to the authors’ and organisers’ institutions, so that the academic benefits obtained can also be re-examined. Organisations that award points and prizes simply for the presence of a paper in a database must bear some of the responsibility: an indexed publication merely documents that an article has been recorded, without certifying the validity of the research.

The decision to retract 1,417 articles in a single day shows that the IEEE finally possesses, at least in certain circumstances, the capacity to take action on a large scale and at short notice. The real test will be applying that capacity to routine conference proceedings, taking action before papers enter the literature and systematically evaluating those already published. After twenty years of scandals, the prestigious scientific society has yet to demonstrate that it can prioritise the quality of research—as its brand promises—over the commercial interests associated with conferences. The problem is not how quickly it can retract a thousand articles after someone else has uncovered the fraud, but how many millions of articles it has distributed without being able to guarantee that they had ever undergone scientific scrutiny worthy of the name.