IEEE Plagiarism Policy and Prohibited Authors List (PAL)

What the policy actually does to an author, in order of how much it hurts. A Notice of Violation of Publication Principles is published in IEEE Xplore and attached to the offending paper’s bibliographic record, where it stays permanently and travels with every future citation of that paper. The author’s privileges to submit to IEEE venues are suspended for a fixed period, or – for the most serious or repeated cases – prohibited for life across all IEEE-copyrighted publications. And for the duration of a suspension the author’s name and email address sit in IEEE’s internal screening database: the Prohibited Authors List (PAL), relabelled the PPL in more recent PSPB Operations Manual language. The suspension expires. The published notice does not.

The PAL is not a public register. You cannot look yourself up, your employer cannot look you up, and no external website holds a genuine copy of it. It is a tool for IEEE publication volunteers: editors and conference programme chairs run a check against the PAL Database before a submission proceeds, and a match is routed to IEEE’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Office for identity confirmation rather than being acted on by the editor directly. Any page offering to search “the IEEE prohibited authors list” is not showing you IEEE’s list.

“How much plagiarism is allowed in an IEEE conference paper?”

None. That is a real and frequent search, and it rests on a false premise worth stating plainly: the percentages in IEEE’s Level One to Level Five scale are severity grades applied after a finding, not a tolerance you may publish beneath. There is no permitted quantity of uncredited copying.

Nor is a similarity-detection score the policy. A similarity report is an input that a human committee interprets. A paper can score low overall and still be a Level One case, and can score high and be entirely clean – correctly quoted and cited material, standard method boilerplate and reference lists all inflate a similarity percentage without constituting textual plagiarism. Treating a checker’s percentage as if it were IEEE’s level is the most common error authors make when trying to self-assess a manuscript before submission.

The severity ladder and its corrective actions

IEEE’s guidance, set out in PSPB Operations Manual section 8.2.4.D and its accompanying Plagiarism Levels and Corrective Actions document, grades a case by the extent of uncredited or improperly credited copying: from Level One (an entire paper, or more than half of one, copied without credit) down to Level Five (verbatim material that is credited but is not clearly delineated as a direct quotation, so a reader cannot tell who wrote what). Corrective actions escalate with the level and with any prior finding against the same author.

At the severe end, IEEE’s published guidance attaches a Notice of Violation of Publication Principles plus suspension of publication privileges – commonly cited as up to five years for Level One – and reserves a lifetime prohibition for the gravest or repeated cases, applied at the discretion of the PSPB Chair. At the lower levels the emphasis shifts to a written apology to the plagiarised authors and to the publication editor, and to correcting the record, with suspension held in reserve where the apology is not forthcoming.

CASRAI could not fully reconcile the stated suspension durations across IEEE’s own restatements of this policy. IEEE IPR Office training material and various society-level policies quote different ranges for the middle levels – one to three years in some restatements, up to five in others – and individual societies, such as the IEEE Communications Society, layer their own minimum bans on top for cases they adjudicate themselves. Treat any specific duration you see quoted, including on this page, as indicative, and read the current PSPB Operations Manual and IEEE’s own Plagiarism Levels and Corrective Actions PDF for the authoritative text before relying on a number in a formal context.

How a case actually proceeds

An allegation goes to the responsible person for the publication – the editor-in-chief of a journal, or the equivalent officer for a conference. That person appoints an independent ad hoc committee of experts in the topic to investigate confidentially and make a recommendation. Corrective action follows that recommendation, with the more serious sanctions administered at PSPB level rather than by the individual publication. Two features of this matter to an accused author: the process is confidential while it runs, and it is adjudicated by subject-matter peers rather than by software. A rebuttal that engages with the substance of what was copied, and why, has somewhere to land.

What is not an IEEE plagiarism case

Several adjacent problems are handled under different rules and should not be described as plagiarism levels. Reusing your own earlier text with a citation is a text-recycling question. Submitting the same work to two venues at once, or republishing it, falls under IEEE’s multiple-submission and duplicate publication rules. Fabricating or falsifying data is research misconduct in the broader sense and is not scored on this scale at all. Breaching reviewer confidentiality is a peer-review ethics matter – see IEEE double-blind peer review for how IEEE structures review in the first place. And where a published paper has to be removed from the record rather than annotated, the instrument is a retraction, which is a different action from a Notice of Violation and is recorded differently.

A note on terminology: searchers frequently look for an IEEE “prohibited participants list”. IEEE’s own publishing documents use Prohibited Authors List (PAL) and, in more recent PSPB Operations Manual text, PPL. CASRAI found no separate IEEE publications-side list under a “participants” name; if you were sent looking for one, PAL/PPL is almost certainly what was meant.

Related terms

• Plagiarism – the general concept IEEE’s levels grade.
• Textual plagiarism – the verbatim-copying form the Level One to Five scale is built around.
• Duplicate publication – handled under separate IEEE rules.
• Research misconduct – the wider category, including fabrication and falsification.
• COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) – the cross-publisher body whose flowcharts many publishers apply to the same situations.
• Retraction – the removal mechanism, distinct from a Notice of Violation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I check whether I’m on the IEEE Prohibited Authors List?

No. The PAL is not a public register: you cannot look yourself up, and no external website holds a genuine copy of it. It exists as an internal screening tool that editors and conference programme chairs check before a submission proceeds, with any match forwarded to IEEE’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Office for identity confirmation rather than acted on directly.

Is the “IEEE Prohibited Participants List” the same as the Prohibited Authors List (PAL)?

Almost certainly, yes. IEEE’s own publishing documents use Prohibited Authors List (PAL), and more recent PSPB Operations Manual text calls it the PPL. CASRAI found no separate IEEE publications-side list under a “participants” name, so if you were pointed toward one, PAL/PPL is what was meant.

Does a low plagiarism-checker score mean a paper is safe under IEEE’s policy?

Not necessarily, and the reverse is also true. A similarity report is only an input that a human committee interprets: a paper can score low overall and still be judged a Level One case, or score high because correctly quoted material, standard method boilerplate, and reference lists inflate the percentage without constituting textual plagiarism.

How long can an IEEE publication ban last?

It ranges from a fixed suspension – commonly cited as up to five years at the most severe level – to a lifetime prohibition across all IEEE-copyrighted publications for the gravest or repeated cases, applied at the discretion of the PSPB Chair. IEEE’s own restatements of the policy quote different specific ranges for the middle levels, so treat any exact duration, including the ones on this page, as indicative rather than authoritative.

Who decides an IEEE plagiarism case?

Not a similarity-detection tool. The editor-in-chief of a journal, or the equivalent conference officer, appoints an independent ad hoc committee of subject-matter experts to investigate confidentially and recommend an outcome, with the most serious sanctions administered at PSPB level rather than by the individual publication.

Is duplicate publication treated the same as plagiarism under IEEE’s rules?

No. Submitting the same work to two venues at once, or republishing it, falls under IEEE’s separate multiple-submission and duplicate publication rules rather than the plagiarism severity scale, even though both are publication-ethics issues.