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…
In 2022, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established the Publishing Ethics Team to manage a growing number of publishing misconduct allegations. This team not only handles claims but also aims to enhance IEEE's visibility in the broader publishing ethics field, and supports IEEE volunteers in crafting new policies.
The team's efforts in 2024 included integrating detection tools from the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) Integrity Hub into the peer-review workflow of IEEE Access, a multidisciplinary, fully gold-open-access journal. These tools, such as the Clear Skies Papermill Alarm, the PubPeer database integration, and the duplicate submissions detector, aim to identify potentially fraudulent manuscripts and fraudulent references at submission, thus preventing the publication of problematic content.
IEEE plans to extend these services to all its periodicals by the end of 2024. In addition to technical tools, the team has been actively involved in raising awareness and improving standards. Members attended various industry-wide initiatives, including the Committee on Publication Ethics, and presented at conferences like the Council of Science Editors annual meeting and the Society for Scholarly Publishing's annual meeting.
Last year, the team received 591 ethics-related complaints, marking a 56% increase from 2024. These complaints primarily concerned research misconduct, such as plagiarism, AI-generated text, and data falsification. The complexity of the cases has also increased, with many complaints involving multiple articles or intricate situations like editorial misconduct or peer-review manipulation.
The team's review of cases has provided valuable insights, leading to updates in policies and best practices. For instance, one case involved coauthor collaboration issues, while another addressed the use of tortured phrases in conference articles, which were identified using the Problematic Paper Screener tool.
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