The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers announced on 28 October that it had retracted 1,417 conference papers in one batch on 23 October, after an external study linked them to paper mills selling authorship slots. The retraction notices state the papers 'may have been offered for sale,' and Nature's analysis found 1,622 of the 2,062 flagged papers have now been pulled, bringing IEEE's 2026 retraction total to nearly 3,000.
nature.com
· 2026-10-30
Retraction Watch identified the nonsensical phrase 'vegetative electron microscopy' appearing repeatedly in recent academic papers. The term originated from a faulty optical character recognition scan of a 1959 paper that merged 'vegetative cell' from one text column with 'electron microscopy' from an adjacent column. The phrase has since propagated into databases and, apparently, into AI-generated or AI-assisted manuscripts submitted to journals.
sciencebase.com
· 2026-10-08
Governments and funders in India, Peru and Vietnam have introduced new guidelines that punish researchers for fabricated data, plagiarism, image manipulation and peer-review fraud. Sanctions include cutting bonuses, blocking access to future grants and downgrading the institutional rankings of universities linked to misconduct cases. The moves follow reports showing sharp rises in fabricated citations and suspected paper-mill activity in scientific literature.
nature.com
· 2026-09-03
GoKawiil