Opening Pandora's box: Paper mills in conference proceedings
2026/04/24 by Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová, Yagmur Ozturk +1 · 6 voices
#cs.DL
paper · pdf
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.
Discussions
- Did you know there's a barely hidden market for authorship of fake scientific papers in conferences? New preprint w/ @abalkina.bsky.social, @mkunesova.bsky.social, and @yaamurozturk.bsky.social : arxi [bsky, 63 points, 1 comments]
- Next up: @abalkina.bsky.social with "Opening Pandora’s Box: Paper Mills in Conference Proceedings" Paper mills have also infiltrated conference proceedings. We focused on IEEE, where abstracts should [bsky, 17 points, 2 comments]
- I'm excited to share our new preprint on paper mills in conferences. We explored 200+ social media channels that promoted offers for sale and identified 1,720 papers published in 286 IEEE conferences. [bsky, 10 points, 1 comments]
- “paper mills are a large, organized…market that commercializes scientific misconduct…infiltrating multiple parts of the research ecosystem” arxiv.org/abs/2604.22458 via @steinly0.bsky.social [bsky, 7 points, 1 comments]
- Also check out a closely-related work by @abalkina.bsky.social @yaamurozturk.bsky.social @mkunesova.bsky.social and @solalpirelli.bsky.social where they identified more than 1700 conference proceeding [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]
- Paper mills in academia- “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 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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