What happened
IEEE announced on 4 November 2026 that it had retracted approximately 1,400 papers from the IEEE Xplore Digital Library after a review, according to the announcement as published by STM. The papers were found to violate IEEE’s publication principles. The announcement says an external study first identified the irregularities and that IEEE then investigated using new technology and advanced screening methods. IEEE puts the retracted papers at less than 0.06% of its conference publications over the six-year period, out of more than 350,000 conference papers a year.
An opinion piece in Il Foglio gives a more precise count: 1,417 articles retracted on 23 October 2026. It attributes the underlying investigation to Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová and colleagues, who found 4,407 advertisements selling authorship slots and linked 2,062 IEEE conference papers from 366 conferences to them. The same piece says 1,622 of those 2,062 papers had been retracted by the time Nature reported on the matter, and that the author considers IEEE’s 0.06% framing statistically unsound. Those figures come from a single opinion article (machine-translated into English) and are reported here as that outlet’s account, not as independently confirmed. The Nature report that the queue pointed to could not be read in full for this post, so nothing here relies on it. A linked-ad match shows a title appeared in an authorship-for-sale advertisement; it does not by itself prove that any individual author paid for authorship.
Why it matters
Conference proceedings are a long-standing weak point for paper-mill activity, partly because review is run conference by conference rather than by a central editorial board. IEEE’s statement says it is expanding screening tools, working with STM, the STM Integrity Hub and COPE, using volunteer subject-matter experts for investigations, strengthening oversight and peer review, updating publication-ethics education, and tightening retraction and removal policies. W. Clem Karl, IEEE Vice President, Publication Services and Products, is quoted as saying that protecting the integrity of the scholarly record is a responsibility shared across the entire research community.
What it means for researchers, universities and research offices
- Researchers: check whether any paper on your CV, in a grant application or in your citations appears in an IEEE retraction notice, and correct the record yourself before someone else finds it. Treat unsolicited offers of authorship positions as a red flag.
- Research integrity offices: expect retraction notices to surface in institutional repositories, CRIS records and promotion files. Decide in advance how a retraction is flagged and who reviews affected staff, applying the same fair process you would use for any integrity concern; a retraction notice is not a finding of misconduct by a given author.
- Research offices and libraries: add a retraction-status check to reporting and evaluation workflows, and review how conference outputs are counted in assessment, in line with integrity and compliance practice.
- Publishers and societies: the case adds to the argument for dedicated integrity capacity; see why scholarly societies are hiring research-integrity directors and our earlier look at a peer-review collusion network retraction.
What is not yet known
The accessible sources do not name the affected conferences, list the full set of retracted papers, or give IEEE’s own wording for the October retraction notices. Check IEEE Xplore retraction notices directly for any specific paper.
Sources
- STM: IEEE to retract approximately 1,400 articles that did not meet standards (read 12 November 2026)
- Il Foglio: The scientific fraud behind the IEEE’s prestige (opinion; read 12 November 2026)
