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Record-breaking retraction: scholarly publisher pulls 1,400 conference papers on one day
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One of the world’s top professional societies for scientists and engineers has retracted 1,417 conference papers in one go.
The move was announced in a 28 October statement by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in New York City. It is the largest single bulk retraction issued by any scholarly publisher, research-integrity specialists told Nature.
The IEEE announcement did not identify the affected papers. However, Nature's news team has verified that IEEE retracted at least 1,417 conference papers on 23 October. All of them were previously identified by a study1 of research works that can be traced to social-media advertisements by paper mills – businesses that sell authorship slots for papers which in turn often describe low-quality or fake research.
That study – originally posted in April as a preprint2 and published this month in the journal Accountability in Research – listed 2,062 papers published in 366 IEEE conference proceedings between 2021 and 2026.
According to the IEEE statement, “after the irregularities were identified via an external study” the publisher conducted a comprehensive review and found that the papers violated “IEEE’s publication principles”. The retraction notices for all 1,417 papers pulled last week, and for another 7 that have no clear retraction date, state that the articles “may have been offered for sale”.
“It is unbelievable. They’re so fast,” says Anna Abalkina, a research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, who is a co-author of the Accountability in Research study.
Nature's news team’s analysis also found that, 1,622 out of the 2,062 articles that the study flagged for links to paper mills have now been retracted by IEEE. Overall, IEEE has retracted nearly 3,000 papers so far in 2026, the analysis from Nature's news team suggests.
The analysis cross-checked Abalkina's dataset with a database called Problematic Paper Screener that identifies retracted papers from publishers’ websites. It was created by computer scientist Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse, France.
This is not the first time IEEE has pulled articles in bulk. In 2015, it retracted more than 1,200 papers and abstracts from a single 2011 conference. Other outlets have also done this. Hindawi, a now-defunct London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, retracted more than 9,500 articles by the end of 2023, including 567 retractions in one go, a Wiley spokesperson told Nature.