Record-breaking retraction: scholarly publisher pulls 1,400 conference papers on one day
One of the world’s top professional societies for scientists and engineers has retracted 1,417 conference papers in one go.
The move was announced in a 28 October statement by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. It is the largest single bulk retraction issued by any scholarly publisher, research-integrity specialists told Nature.
The IEEE announcement did not identify the affected papers. However, Nature’s news team has verified that IEEE retracted at least 1,417 conference papers on 23 October. All of them were previously identified by a study of research works that can be traced to social-media advertisements by paper mills — businesses that sell authorship slots for papers which, in turn, often describe low-quality or fake research.
That study — originally posted in April as a preprintand published this month in the journal Accountability in Research — listed 2,062 papers published in 366 IEEE conference proceedings between 2021 and 2026.
