IEEE publishing ethics staff opened 591 publication-integrity cases in 2025, a 56 percent increase from 2024, IEEE said, while expanding automated screening meant to catch bad manuscripts before they land in the scholarly record.
The organization created its Publishing Ethics Team in 2022 as a central group to help handle misconduct allegations, support IEEE volunteers writing policy, and give IEEE a more visible role in publishing-ethics work. Publication ethics, in this context, means the rules and investigations that protect the reliability of journals and conference proceedings: authorship, plagiarism, peer review, data use, and corrections or retractions when things go wrong.
What is IEEE doing about publishing ethics?
IEEE said it tested tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers, known as STM, in the peer-review workflow for IEEE Access during 2024. That journal is a multidisciplinary, fully gold open-access publication covering IEEE fields of interest.
The STM Integrity Hub gives publishers access to integrated research-integrity tools, including commercial third-party services and tools developed through STM Solutions. IEEE said the point is to screen manuscripts when they arrive, rather than waiting until after publication to deal with junk. That is the right place to catch it, assuming the tools do what their vendors and sponsors say they do.
The tools include Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, which flags manuscripts that may be fraudulent at submission. Another integration checks the PubPeer database, allowing editors to see whether cited papers have drawn PubPeer comments or have been retracted. IEEE also cited a duplicate-submission detector that can identify cases where the same manuscript has been sent to journals run by different publishers, a pattern IEEE described as often associated with paper-mill activity.
After the pilot, IEEE said it began work in 2025 to extend Integrity Hub screening to all IEEE periodicals. The organization expects all of its periodicals to be included by the end of this year.
Most complaints involved research conduct
IEEE said its Publishing Ethics Team tracks complaints for articles in both periodicals and conference proceedings. Complaints can arrive by email at [email protected] or through an anonymous ethics reporting line. The team then works with IEEE volunteers to open a case, investigate, and resolve it.
Of the 591 cases opened in 2025, IEEE said 317 were closed and 274 remained under investigation. Research-related allegations made up 88 percent of complaints, including plagiarism, AI-generated text, falsified data, and unauthorized use of data. The remaining 12 percent involved alleged misconduct by editors, reviewers, and conference organizers.
IEEE said the cases have become more complicated, with more complaints involving multiple articles or issues such as editorial misconduct and peer-review manipulation.
Conference papers drew heavy scrutiny
For the second year in a row, the Publishing Ethics Team joined a committee run by the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board and the IEEE Conferences Committee on conference publication quality. IEEE said the committee reviews problematic conference papers, improves prepublication quality screening, and updates educational modules for people who organize and manage conferences.
A focus was “tortured phrases,” meaning awkward or incorrect expressions that appear to mimic technical language. IEEE said many papers reviewed by the committee were flagged by the Problematic Paper Screener, a free online tool that uses application programming interfaces to scan online papers for warning signs such as tortured phrases, machine-generated text from systems such as SCIgen or Mathgen, and references to retracted work.
IEEE said the ad hoc committee reviewed and recommended the retraction of more than 1,700 problematic conference articles in 2025.
Cases changed policy and penalties
IEEE described two anonymized cases from 2025. In one, a coauthor reported that work had been reused in an IEEE publication without proper credit and that two additional coauthors had been added to the new work. A university research integrity officer helped determine that methodological and theoretical material had come from the university lab and that the added authors had not contributed enough to justify authorship.
IEEE said the matter led the IEEE Publishing Conduct Committee and IEEE Document Working Group to update PSPB Policy 8.2.4, clarifying how IEEE handles reused material and author credit.
In another case, an editor in chief saw suspicious reviewer behavior after two reviewers submitted identical review text for the same article. IEEE said an investigation found that the original handling editor had created and submitted both reviews. After committee recommendations, IEEE said the handling editor was barred from publishing with IEEE and from serving in an editorial role.
This story draws on original reporting from IEEE Spectrum.
