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.

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analysis also found that, 1,622 out of the 2,062 articles that the study flagged for links to paper mills have now been retracted by IEEE.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.

Authorship for sale

The team found that, overall, prices for authorship ranged from US$43 to $400 for a first-author slot and $11 to $200 for a last-author slot. The study also shows that of the 109 IEEE-sponsored conferences that published five or more papers matching paper-mill adverts, 95 took place in India.

“Paper mills are a public market and the offers for sale are public on social media. Anyone can find them. Anyone can buy. Anyone can trace [them],” says Abalkina.

IEEE is a frequent target for paper mills because of the nature and volume of its conference activity, says Marie Kunešová, a computer scientist at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, the Czech Republic, and a co-author of the study.

The organization has more than 533,000 members in some 190 countries. It publishes around 250 journals and sponsors more than 2,000 conferences annually, resulting in around 350,000 conference papers.

Researchers need to apply to IEEE or one of its member organizations to use its name to host a conference anywhere. Conference organizers can also apply to obtain technical sponsorship from IEEE, which publishes the final proceedings. The conferences’ local organizing committees handle submissions and peer review.

Conference submissions are not subject to the same integrity checks that submissions to IEEE journals undergo, says Abalkina. They are “fast to publish” and often indexed in scholarly databases, she adds. Kunešová thinks that “IEEE should implement more oversight over the different sections” it publishes, particularly conferences.

Nature’s news team contacted IEEE for a response. No reply to our questions was received by the time this article was published. However, a representative referred us to the public statement, which notes that affected articles in the latest retraction batch “represent less than 0.06% of conference publications for the six-year period”.

Last year, the organization retracted more than 1,700 articles from conference proceedings.

Conferences targeted