IEEE Publishing Ethics Team Upholds Research Integrity

Given a rising number of publishing misconduct allegations , IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEEE volunteers write new policies. Here are some highlights of the team’s activities last year. New detection tools IEEE conducted a pilot program in 2024 to integrate tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access . The multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal publishes research results across all IEEE fields of interest. STM created the hub so scholarly publishers could access a suite of integrated, commercial, third-party research integrity tools as well as those developed by STM Solutions . The tools help the publishing group avoid printing problematic content upon manuscript receipt, rather than reacting postpublication. The new features include the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm , which helps identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts at submission. Another is an integration with the PubPeer database , which allows users to check whether references in a manuscript have received previous PubPeer comments or have been retracted—both of which can indicate quality or integrity issues. The duplicate submissions detector can determine whether the same manuscript has been submitted to multiple journals by different publishers, often a sign of academic “paper mill” activity. Following the success of the pilot, IEEE began working last year to expand the services to all its periodicals. It is anticipated that all IEEE periodicals will be included in the Integrity Hub screening by the end of this year. Raising visibility The team participated in industry-wide initiatives with STM. It also renewed membership in groups including the Committee on Publication Ethics , and the team continued its work sponsoring and presenting at conferences. At a panel presentation during the Council of Science Editors annual meeting last year, Amanda Sulicz , manager of IEEE Research Integrity, participated in the Research Integrity Investigation panel session . She also presented at the Standardization of Publishing Integrity Norms and Corrective Actions poster session during the Society for Scholarly Publishing ’s annual meeting, held 28 to 30 May 2025. Luigi Longobardi , the IEEE Publishing Ethics and Conduct director, gave a presentation at the Communication and Collaboration With Institutions session during STM Innovation and Integrity Days , which took place 9 and 10 December. IEEE was a sponsor of the National Conference on Research Integrity , held 20 to 22 May 2025, and the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication , held 3 to 5 September. Ethics reports The team is responsible for tracking ethics-related complaints for all IEEE publications, including articles published in periodicals and conference proceedings. When complaints regarding an article’s integrity are received, either via email at pub-ethics@ieee.org or the anonymous ethics reporting line , the team works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, investigate the complaint, and resolve the matter. Last year 591 cases were opened, a 56 percent increase over 2024. Of the 591 reports, 317 were closed and 274 are still under investigation. Of the complaints, 88 percent were research-related, including issues with plagiarism, AI-generated text, and falsification of—or unauthorized use of—data. The other 12 percent involved alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and conference organizers. The complexity of the reported cases has expanded. An increasing number of the complaints deal with more than one article or complicated situations such as editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation. Conference publications For the second consecutive year, the team participated in 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 conference papers and enhancing quality screening of articles prior to publication to detect integrity issues such as plagiarism and tortured phrases. The committee also updates educational modules on organizing and managing conferences. As part of the review process, the committee focused on conference articles that contained tortured phrases, which are nonstandard English expressions that are imprecise or erroneous and give the impression of technical jargon. Many of the articles reviewed by the ad hoc committee were identified by the Problematic Paper Screener , a free online tool that uses application programming interfaces to screen papers published online for potentially problematic content, such as tortured phrases, machine-generated content ( SCIgen or Mathgen , for example), or references to retracted content. The ad hoc committee was responsible for reviewing and recommending the retraction of more than 1,700 problematic conference articles last year. Case studies From the cases the team reviewed, IEEE learned valuable information to help update its publishing policies and best practices. Here are examples of two anonymized cases reported to the team last year. Case Study 1 Updated Policies Occasionally, a misconduct case is so complicated that it requires an update to the PSPB Operations Manual . In this particular case, Coauthor 1 reported to the Publishing Ethics Team that the work was reused in an IEEE publication without proper credit. The new work also listed two coauthors not part of the original document. Coauthor 1 also reported the case to their university’s research integrity officer (RIO) for additional investigation. Initially, adjudicating the case proved challenging because under the PSPB policies at the time, the issue would have been classified as a multiple publication, which typically results only in a warning for the authors of the new work. With the assistance of the RIO, it was determined that the methodological and theoretical portions of the paper were previously derived in the university’s lab; therefore, the contributions of the two new authors were not substantial enough to warrant authorship. After deliberations by the IEEE Publishing Conduct Committee and eventually the IEEE Document Working Group, which is responsible for updates to the Operations Manual, IEEE PSPB Policy 8.2.4 was updated to clarify policies regarding the adjudication process for reuse of material and the proper crediting of coauthors when material has been reused. Case Study 2 Faked Reviewers Using the screening tools and data available to IEEE periodical editors, an editor in chief was alerted to suspicious reviewer activity. Specifically, two of the reviewers assigned to an article submitted the exact same review text. The editor contacted the handling editor to inform them of the irregularities and also contacted the two reviewers, asking them to verify that they were, in fact, the ones who submitted the reviewer report. Out of an abundance of caution, a new editor was assigned to the article, and new reviewers were selected while the investigation continued. The investigation concluded that the original handling editor created and submitted both reviews in question. Following the recommendations provided to the PSPB vice president by the periodical’s Society and Publishing Conduct Committee, the handling editor was banned from publishing with IEEE and serving in an editorial capacity.