Opening Pandora's box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

TL;DR

This study uncovers the widespread presence of paper mill-produced papers in IEEE conference proceedings, revealing significant misconduct and collaboration irregularities affecting scientific integrity.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of paper mill infiltration in conference proceedings, identifying over 1,700 problematic papers and highlighting their characteristics.

Findings

Up to 23.51% of some conferences' papers are from paper mills.

Problematic papers show collaboration anomalies and content irregularities.

Paper mills operate as a large, organized, and public market for scientific misconduct.

Abstract

Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scientific subfields. This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms. We collected more than 4,000 unique publication offers from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings. We identified 1,720 papers in 286 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.51% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are co-authored by more than 6,500 researchers from over 3,500 affiliations in 55 countries. The identified papers demonstrate collaboration anomalies, high diversity of affiliations per paper, citation manipulation, a predominance of six-author papers, and content-based irregularities. Our findings show that paper mills are a large, organized, and often public market that commercializes scientific misconduct, not limited to papers, but infiltrating multiple parts of the research ecosystem.