Given a rising variety of publishing misconduct allegations, IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Workforce as a centralized division to help in dealing with claims. The group additionally works to extend the group’s visibility within the broader publishing ethics space and helps IEEE volunteers write new insurance policies.
Listed here are some highlights of the group’s actions final 12 months.
New detection instruments
IEEE performed a pilot program in 2024 to combine instruments from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access. The multidisciplinary, totally gold-open-access journal publishes analysis outcomes throughout all IEEE fields of curiosity.
STM created the hub so scholarly publishers may entry a collection of built-in, industrial, third-party analysis integrity instruments in addition to these developed by STM Solutions. The instruments assist the publishing group keep away from printing problematic content material upon manuscript receipt, fairly than reacting postpublication.
The brand new options embody the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, which helps establish doubtlessly fraudulent manuscripts at submission. One other is an integration with the PubPeer database, which permits customers to examine whether or not references in a manuscript have acquired earlier PubPeer feedback or have been retracted—each of which might point out high quality or integrity points. The duplicate submissions detector can decide whether or not the identical manuscript has been submitted to a number of journals by completely different publishers, usually an indication of educational “paper mill” exercise.
Following the success of the pilot, IEEE started working final 12 months to broaden the companies to all its periodicals. It’s anticipated that each one IEEE periodicals will probably be included within the Integrity Hub screening by the top of this 12 months.
Elevating visibility
The group participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It additionally renewed membership in teams together with the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the group continued its work sponsoring and presenting at conferences.
At a panel presentation through the Council of Science Editors annual meeting final 12 months, Amanda Sulicz, supervisor of IEEE Analysis Integrity, participated within the Analysis Integrity Investigation panel session. She additionally introduced on the Standardization of Publishing Integrity Norms and Corrective Actions poster session through the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s annual assembly, held 28 to 30 Could 2025.
Luigi Longobardi, the IEEE Publishing Ethics and Conduct director, gave a presentation on the Communication and Collaboration With Establishments session throughout STM Innovation and Integrity Days, which occurred 9 and 10 December.
IEEE was a sponsor of the National Conference on Research Integrity, held 20 to 22 Could 2025, and the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, held 3 to five September.
Ethics studies
The group is accountable for monitoring ethics-related complaints for all IEEE publications, together with articles revealed in periodicals and convention proceedings. When complaints relating to an article’s integrity are acquired, both by way of e-mail at pub-ethics@ieee.org or the nameless ethics reporting line, the group works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, examine the criticism, and resolve the matter.
Final 12 months 591 instances had been opened, a 56 p.c enhance over 2024. Of the 591 studies, 317 had been closed and 274 are nonetheless beneath investigation. Of the complaints, 88 p.c had been research-related, together with points with plagiarism, AI-generated textual content, and falsification of—or unauthorized use of—information. The opposite 12 p.c concerned alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and convention organizers.
The complexity of the reported instances has expanded. An rising variety of the complaints cope with multiple article or difficult conditions similar to editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation.
Convention publications
For the second consecutive 12 months, the group participated within the joint IEEE Publication Services and Products Board/IEEE Conferences Committee’s ad hoc committee on conference publication quality. The committee is tasked with analyzing and reviewing problematic convention papers and enhancing high quality screening of articles previous to publication to detect integrity points similar to plagiarism and tortured phrases. The committee additionally updates instructional modules on organizing and managing conferences.
As a part of the assessment course of, the committee centered on convention articles that contained tortured phrases, that are nonstandard English expressions which can be imprecise or misguided and provides the impression of technical jargon.
Most of the articles reviewed by the advert hoc committee had been recognized by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free on-line software that makes use of utility programming interfaces to display screen papers revealed on-line for doubtlessly problematic content material, similar to tortured phrases, machine-generated content material (SCIgen or Mathgen, for instance), or references to retracted content material.
The advert hoc committee was accountable for reviewing and recommending the retraction of greater than 1,700 problematic convention articles final 12 months.
Case research
From the instances the group reviewed, IEEE discovered helpful data to assist replace its publishing insurance policies and finest practices.
Listed here are examples of two anonymized instances reported to the group final 12 months.
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