IOP Publishing renounces 350 papers due to systematic and citation manipulation
IOP Publishing has withdrawn 350 papers from two 2021 conference proceedings as evidence of systematic manipulation and considerable citation manipulation were observed during an investigation. Of the withdrawn papers, 232 articles were published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series1 and the others in IOP Conference Series: Material Science and Engineering2.
Rachael Harper, Head of Marketing Communications at IOP said that following an anonymous whistleblower's tip and the discovery of tortured phrases by an AI-driven software the investigation was launched. The findings of the investigation confirmed all speculations around systematic and citation manipulations in the two volumes. “There has been no reasonable explanation from the conference organizers regarding either volume as to why these issues occurred,” she said. The “anonymous whistleblower” was later identified to be a Cambridge engineering graduate student named Nick Wise.3
The term “tortured phrases,”4 which Harper mentions, refers to texts that have been translated from another language to English and then back to English using an automated tool. Such tools are used to generate fake papers.
The manipulation was detected using the tool Problematic Paper Screener, which was developed by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, and his colleagues. Explaining “tortured phrases” in his preprint, Cabanac says these are “unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence.’”5
According to Harper, some telling factors that indicated the manipulation included almost all papers containing "unrelated reference to the conference organiser’s work and others at the organiser’s institutions,"6 multiple papers with overlapping text and a similar publishing date, numerous tortured phrases (indicative of plagiarized text), and peer review reports with identical content and format.
IOP Publishing had flagged more than 20 papers in 2020 that had similar issues. To avoid such incidents in future, Harper stated that they will place additional checks prior to publication and run all submitted articles through a tortured-phrase detecting software.
References:
1. Journal of Physics: Conference Series. https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/1742-6596/1916/1
2. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/1757-899X/1145/1
3, 6. Publisher retracts 350 papers at once. https://retractionwatch.com/2022/02/23/publisher-retracts-350-papers-at-once/
4. Cabanac G., Labbé C., Magazinov A. Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
5. ‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers. https://retractionwatch.com/2021/07/19/tortured-phrases-lost-in-translation-sleuths-find-even-more-problems-at-journal-that-just-flagged-400-papers/
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