# How a Tortured Conference Becomes a Series: An Analysis of Conference Manipulations

Wendeline Swart, Guillaume Cabanac, Ophélie Fraisier-Vannier, Gilles Hubert

► To cite this version:

Wendeline Swart, Guillaume Cabanac, Ophélie Fraisier-Vannier, Gilles Hubert. How a Tortured Conference Becomes a Series: An Analysis of Conference Manipulations. 2025 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Dec 2025, Dekalb, United States. pp.11-19, 10.1109/jcdl67857.2025.00012 . hal-05497913

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# How a Tortured Conference Becomes a Series:
## An Analysis of Conference Manipulations

Wendeline Swart

IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS
University of Toulouse
Toulouse, France
0009-0007-4502-4283

Guillaume Cabanac

IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS
University of Toulouse
Toulouse, France
Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)
Paris, France
0000-0003-3060-6241

Ophélie Fraisier-Vannier

IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS
University of Toulouse
Toulouse, France
0000-0003-2974-5308

Gilles Hubert

IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS
University of Toulouse
Toulouse, France
0000-0003-3494-7561

**Abstract**—The growing publication rate puts an increasing pressure on peer review. Low-quality articles get accepted despite flaws and scientific misconduct. We focus on the case of tortured articles: publications containing paraphrased scientific expressions that we call tortured phrases. These tortured phrases typically result from authors violating scientific norms, who copy-paraphrase-paste preexisting text: it is a form of synonym-based plagiarism. In this study, we show that such tortured conference articles tend to cluster within certain recurring conference series. We analyze the organization and characteristics of these conferences to better understand the mechanisms behind their emergence and proliferation.

**Index Terms**—plagiarism, tortured phrases, conference proceedings, research integrity, scientific misconduct

## I. INTRODUCTION

With the rapid growth of scientific publications, questionable and low-quality articles are being published despite peer review. Understanding the mechanisms underlying these scientific integrity concerns is urgent matter. In Computer Science (CS) a type of misconduct involving tortured phrases [1] has been plaguing proceedings. We investigate the extent of this pollution affecting hundreds of CS conference series.

Like the other scientific fields, CS is subject to intense competitive pressure to publish. Epitomized by the expression ‘publish or perish,’ this pressure encourages rapid rather than rigorous publication and questionable research practices (QRP) [2]. The quest for visibility and productivity leads some researchers to violate scientific norms and adopt deviant behaviors [3]. These range from blatant forms of misconduct such as data fabrication and falsification to more subtle questionable practices like ghostwriting, guest authorship, or citation manipulation. Some forms of misconduct are identifiable, such as plagiarism or data fabrication. Others reflect broader systemic issues, such as the frequent under-reporting of negative or null results, which skews the scientific record, or citation practices influenced by social or strategic considerations rather than scientific merit. Together, these practices compromise the integrity of research and contribute to a distorted understanding of scientific knowledge [4]. This raises a question: How do editorial and organizational mechanisms allow such dysfunctions to persist? Fanelli [5] argues that fraud

and misconduct are often not exceptional acts but rather routine, systemic behaviors driven by academic incentives. This helps to explain how problematic publications may repeatedly occur in specific venues without institutional correction.

### A. Specificity of the Scientific Production in Computer Science

Journals are traditionally perceived as the most prestigious publication venues in most sciences. Unlike other scientific disciplines, conferences in CS play a central role in the evaluation and dissemination of research. Articles published in CS conference proceedings are subject to peer review and often require an oral presentation [6]. The rapid pace of change in the field demands short publication times and regular updates on the results. This preference for conferences can also be explained by the collaborative and iterative nature of CS research, where direct exchanges at conferences stimulate innovation [7, 8]. Some CS conferences also achieve an impact comparable to or even greater than many journals [9]. This emphasis on conferences is therefore not only cultural, but also structural, and is a major specificity of scientific publication in CS.

### B. Plagiarism with Tortured Phrases: A Scientific Misconduct

These last few years, science integrity concerns gained an increased attention among researchers and the general public. Cabanac, Labbé, and Magazinov described in 2021 what they called ‘tortured phrases.’ [1] These are nonsensical variations of established phrases in the literature, such as ‘herbal language’ instead of ‘natural language’ or ‘k-implies bunching’ for ‘k-means clustering’. They are created by text generators called ‘spinners.’ A spinner rephrases some text a user feeds as input, usually stolen from a publication, and changes words for random synonyms. For example, ‘counterfeit consciousness’ (instead of the expected expression ‘artificial intelligence’) appears in dozens of publications. Authors use such tortured phrases to bypass plagiarism detectors. Tortured phrases have been found in peer-reviewed articles published in various research fields [10–12]. They reflect a growing concern in the literature regarding the infiltration of meaningless or distorted content into scientific discourse [13].
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Workflow for identifying and validating tortured phrases, with iterative feedback from detection to PubPeer monitoring.</figcaption></figure>

It was by tracing the original, plagiarized articles that we were able to identify the thesaurus-based rewriting tools (e.g., SpinBot) and to uncover several tortured versions that had not yet been detected. These distortions cannot be explained by translation errors. Some phrases distort field-specific technical concepts whose meaning cannot be altered without losing sense. We observed cases where abbreviations do not match their definition, such as ‘Herbal Language Processing (NLP)’ instead of ‘Natural Language Processing (NLP).’ This unexpected discrepancy suggests that no human spotted and corrected this error, which questions the quality of manuscript preparation and peer review process. In the published literature, we found thousands of articles showing a concentration of dozens of tortured phrases.

This paper explores the recurring presence of such problematic articles in specific CS conference proceedings and questions the editorial and organizational mechanisms that allow their persistence over time. We hypothesize that certain conferences are disproportionately affected by these problematic articles. Our objective is twofold. First, we document the presence of tortured phrases. Second, we reflect on their implications for the integrity and governance of digital scholarly communication, a concern of interest for the JCDL community.

## II. DATA & METHOD

### A. Identification of Tortured Phrases From the Literature

Identifying tortured phrases in the published literature is a collective task that is time-consuming and tedious. Even though research is underway to automate this process [14], this work is currently done manually through post-publication peer review (PPPR). Scientific experts engage in PPPR through platforms such as PubPeer<fnref n="1" /> [15], where they comment on

anomalies found in published articles, including potential tortured phrases. Our team daily extracts these from PubPeer comments. We use them to inform the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS) [16], a website that reports issues identified in the published literature. We analyze and validate them with the Dimensions<fnref n="2" /> bibliographic platform:

1. **Temporal analysis:** Examination of the distribution of occurrences of the candidate phrase before and after 2015, when paraphrasing software gained popularity [18]. Phrases that are absent before 2015 and frequently used afterwards are considered suspicious. In contrast, expressions used since several decades and showing an organic growth in publications are considered genuine. For example, the phrase ‘anomaly detection’ is used since 1959 with steadily increasing use, whereas the phrase ‘squared blunder’ (tortured version of ‘squared error’) did not appear in any article before 2015 and its use has grown increasingly since.

2. **Domain analysis:** Examination of the disciplinary distribution of publications containing the phrase. This helps distinguish genuinely domain-specific terminology from semantically incoherent phrases misused across unrelated fields (referred to here as *domain-dependent phrases*). For example, ‘profound learning’ is a genuine expression in psychology but not in computer science where ‘deep learning’ is expected.

If the tortured nature of a phrase is confirmed, it is added to the list of fingerprints of the Problematic Paper Screener (PPS)<fnref n="3" /> [16]. For domain-dependent phrases, the fingerprints take into account both the tortured and the expected versions of the expression to avoid false positives, such as ‘profound learning’ AND ‘deep learning’. The PPS uses these fingerprints to automatically screen the literature and retrieve potentially problematic publications for further scrutiny. This workflow is summarised in Figure 1. The ‘Tortured’ detector is one of the 10 different detectors implemented in the PPS. Leading publishers and vendors of editorial workflows use the PPS fingerprints to screen manuscripts and articles.<fnref n="4" />

### B. Identification of Tortured Articles in the Literature

The PPS includes two parts: a private dashboard, where articles algorithmically-flagged are collected for internal analysis, and a public dashboard, which displays only the most suspicious cases. The detection pipeline for tortured phrases uses the Dimensions API to query its database with fingerprints matched against the article fulltexts. Any article that contains at least one tortured phrase is automatically presented in the private dashboard.

We are aware of articles containing ‘a few’ fingerprints of tortured phrases despite being non-problematic. This happens in articles studying the phenomenon itself: meta-research

<footnote n="2">²Dimensions: indexes metadata and full texts of 150+ million scholarly publications all disciplines [17].</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener/faq</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹https://pubpeer.com/</footnote>
studies like [1, 12, 19]. This also happens when fingerprints are legitimate in some fields but not in others. To account for this difficulty, the public dashboard does not present articles containing ‘a few’ fingerprints only. Based on experience and expert review, we set a threshold of five tortured phrases: articles meeting or exceeding this number are considered candidates for further scrutiny and are displayed on the dashboard.

This prevents false positives to be presented on the PPS. All articles confirmed to be problematic after human re-assessment are flagged as tortured and presented with the human assessor's name in the public dashboard. Put differently: articles matching less than 5 fingerprints appear in the public dashboard only if a human assessor visually confirmed their tortured nature. As a result, only 3% of articles detected by the PPS are publicly displayed for reassessment. Let us stress that the detection algorithm itself does not determine whether an article is tortured. It only pre-selects candidate articles that are marked as 'for human re-assessment.' The expert assessor makes the final call, thus ensuring the quality and reliability of the public-facing PPS dashboard.

### C. Identification of Tortured Proceedings

We noticed that conference series publish tortured articles year after year [20, 21]. This motivated the present study on PPS records marked with a doctype 'proceeding.' Let us note, however, that some publishers (e.g., AIP Publishing, Elsevier, IOP Publishing) register conference articles with the doctype 'article' and these were excluded from this study, as a result. On 19 February 2025, we downloaded the list of proceeding articles the PPS flagged as containing tortured phrases. For each article, the retrieved metadata include its DOI, title, authors, conference name, and the list of tortured phrases identified. The conference name features the year and its acronym, such as in '2017 International conference of Electronics, Communication and Aerospace Technology (ICECA).' For each article, we extracted the acronym of the conference series: ICECA in our example. This allowed us to group articles by conference series, thus grouping editions of 2017–2024 under the acronym: ICECA. We excluded from our analysis the records for which no acronym was given in the conference title (1.9% of the articles). This derived metadata allows us to study the presence of tortured phrases at the level of conference series to flag problems occurring year after year. We thus mined patterns and potential systemic issues across recurring conference series.

The present study focuses on conference proceedings containing at least 5 tortured articles. This filter ensures that we focus on the most suspicious and recurrent cases.

### D. Data Retrieval for Contextualizing this Study

We wished to assess the extent of the problem in terms of volume (share of tortured articles in proceedings) and geographic distribution (where were the authors affiliated?). We resorted to Dimensions to collect extra data: the set of articles for each conference—part of which only were tortured

articles—and, for each article, the countries declared in the author affiliations.

These data allowed us to examine the characteristics and distribution of articles flagged as problematic. The remainder of this study focuses on the conferences identified as tortured.

## III. RESULTS

### A. Tortured Conference Proceedings

To identify proceedings concentrating tortured articles, we first computed the distribution of tortured articles across different publishers. IEEE stands out as the primary source of tortured articles with 88% of the total (Table I). This over-representation of IEEE led us to zero in on a single publisher: IEEE that 'publishes nearly a third of the world's technical literature [6 million documents] in electrical engineering, computing, and electronics'.<fnref n="5" /> Focusing on a single publisher also allows a consistent analysis of recurrent conferences and publication patterns within a controlled perimeter.

<table><caption>TABLE I
DETECTED TORTURED ARTICLES IN PROCEEDINGS BY PUBLISHER</caption><thead><tr><td>Publisher</td><td>Article Count</td><td>Share of Total (%)</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>IEEE</td><td>5653</td><td>88</td></tr><tr><td>AIP Publishing</td><td>644</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>ACM</td><td>77</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>SPIE</td><td>20</td><td>&lt;1</td></tr><tr><td>Atlantis Press</td><td>14</td><td>&lt;1</td></tr><tr><td>AI Publications</td><td>13</td><td>&lt;1</td></tr><tr><td>Other publishers</td><td>22</td><td>&lt;1</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>6443</td><td>100</td></tr></tbody></table>

### B. Temporal Trends of IEEE Tortured Conference Articles

Figure 2 shows the evolution of the number of tortured articles published by IEEE from 2005 to 2024. They first appeared in the early 2010s but started gaining in popularity in 2015. Between 2015 and 2024, the number of detected tortured articles increased steadily year after year. More worryingly, their frequency among all IEEE proceedings articles also increased. This suggests that this pollution of the scientific literature is intensifying faster than the increase of the scientific output in IEEE proceedings.

In 2024, the PPS flagged 1391 tortured articles published by IEEE across 75 different conferences. This represents 3% of the 2251 IEEE conferences held that year. While this percentage is low, the presence of these articles in a reputable publisher's catalog raises questions about quality control mechanisms.

### C. Disciplinary Distribution of IEEE Tortured Articles

Over 80% of the IEEE tortured articles in proceedings fall under the category 'Information and Computing Sciences' (Table II). This over-representation is not surprising since IEEE primarily publishes in the field of computer science. However, other fields such as engineering, biomedical sciences, or management are also affected.

<footnote n="5">⁵https://www.ieee.org/publications-research</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Number and frequency of tortured proceedings articles presented in IEEE conferences per year.</figcaption></figure>

<table><caption>TABLE II
TOP 10 FIELDS OF RESEARCH (ANZSRC 2020) OF THE TORTURED ARTICLES PRESENTED IN IEEE CONFERENCES.*</caption><thead><tr><td>Field of research</td><td>Article Count</td><td>%</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Information and Computing Sciences</td><td>4610</td><td>81</td></tr><tr><td>Engineering</td><td>927</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Biomedical and Clinical Sciences</td><td>488</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services</td><td>421</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>Health Sciences</td><td>143</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Language, Communication and Culture</td><td>143</td><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>Earth Sciences</td><td>130</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Sciences</td><td>110</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Biological Sciences</td><td>98</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Human Society</td><td>78</td><td>1</td></tr></tbody></table>

The fingerprint catalog of the PPS was initiated with tortured phrases discovered in the CS literature. Then, contributions of scientific detectives from a variety of backgrounds broadened its scope. Some disciplines attracted more attention than others, which might bias the detection. In addition, the PPS does not capture other questionable publishing practices through different misconduct types.

## D. Longitudinal Analysis of IEEE Conferences

IEEE publishes more than 2000 conferences per year. Quite problematically, some conferences accept tortured articles several years in a row: 190 conference series are concerned (Figure 3). We observed that a conference impacted in year Y is likely to be impacted as well during its next edition in year Y+1. Some conferences may not publish any tortured articles

for a few years before displaying a significant quantity in a new edition (e.g., see IC3I in Figure 3).

Figure 3 includes some conferences that are not part of a series because 2024 was their first edition. However, we question organization of any further edition when we see how polluted they are. We will discuss the case of a heavily polluted conference in subsection III-F.

## E. Geographical Distribution

We highlighted in the introduction how institutional pressures can lead authors to churn out low-quality articles. To check if this occurred as per our dataset, we used the authors' affiliations to study the geographical distribution of tortured articles. Each article was counted once for each country listed in its authors' affiliations.

Table III shows that the majority of tortured articles are from authors affiliated with Indian institutions. However raw numbers can penalize countries with a high publication rate such as India. It is essential to analyze these numbers with regard to the overall scientific production of each country. Table IV shows that the country with the highest proportion of tortured articles in our dataset is Ethiopia (7%), whereas India only ranks fourth.

These results highlight the importance of a detailed analysis to better understand the geographical distribution of tortured articles. Similar geographical heterogeneities have been documented for retracted papers, where spatial analyses revealed clusters across countries [22]. Differences in national retraction rates have also been interpreted as reflecting not only misconduct, but also varying levels of editorial and institutional oversight [23]. In some contexts, such as India,

<footnote>* The sum of percentages exceeds 100% because Dimensions classifies articles into one or many fields.</footnote>
<table><caption>Fig. 3. Top 30 IEEE tortured conferences series, as of 19 Feb 2025. Only proceedings with 5 or more tortured articles are presented here. A same acronym can match several conferences in our dataset, in that case we added a numerical identifier, as illustrated in 'ICICT (1).' We encourage readers to consult the additional data or the PPS to see the full names of the conferences.</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Acronyms of the IEEE conferences</th><th colspan="9">Number of Tortured Proceedings per Year</th><th rowspan="2">Total</th></tr><tr><th>2016</th><th>2017</th><th>2018</th><th>2019</th><th>2020</th><th>2021</th><th>2022</th><th>2023</th><th>2024</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>ICCCNT</td><td></td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td></td><td>10</td><td>8</td><td>8</td><td>17</td><td>346</td><td>391</td></tr><tr><td>ICOCWC</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>258</td><td>258</td></tr><tr><td>SMART GENCON</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>96</td><td>31</td><td>139</td></tr><tr><td>ICACCS</td><td></td><td>1</td><td></td><td>9</td><td>26</td><td>25</td><td>21</td><td>12</td><td>15</td><td>109</td></tr><tr><td>ICCES</td><td>3</td><td>12</td><td>17</td><td>5</td><td>10</td><td>18</td><td>19</td><td>3</td><td>4</td><td>91</td></tr><tr><td>ICCCI</td><td>1</td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>15</td><td>12</td><td>22</td><td>27</td><td>1</td><td>88</td></tr><tr><td>IC3I</td><td></td><td></td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td></td><td>24</td><td>41</td><td>18</td><td>87</td></tr><tr><td>ICCMC</td><td></td><td>1</td><td>6</td><td>17</td><td>9</td><td>30</td><td>15</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>82</td></tr><tr><td>ICACITE</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>1</td><td>39</td><td>23</td><td>15</td><td>78</td></tr><tr><td>ICOEI</td><td></td><td></td><td>9</td><td>9</td><td>8</td><td>22</td><td>17</td><td>5</td><td>2</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><td>I-SMAC</td><td></td><td>8</td><td>6</td><td>15</td><td>17</td><td>15</td><td>6</td><td>1</td><td>4</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><td>ICAC3N</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>25</td><td>26</td><td>13</td><td>3</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>ICONSTEM</td><td>1</td><td>12</td><td>2</td><td>11</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>15</td><td>24</td><td>65</td></tr><tr><td>ICSCAN</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>16</td><td>23</td><td>14</td><td></td><td>7</td><td>3</td><td>63</td></tr><tr><td>ICICCS</td><td></td><td>3</td><td>8</td><td></td><td>10</td><td>15</td><td>23</td><td>3</td><td></td><td>62</td></tr><tr><td>ICRITO</td><td>3</td><td></td><td>3</td><td></td><td>9</td><td>26</td><td>7</td><td></td><td>13</td><td>61</td></tr><tr><td>ICECA</td><td></td><td>5</td><td>8</td><td>12</td><td>19</td><td>9</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>ICAIS</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>31</td><td>16</td><td>12</td><td></td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>ICSSIT</td><td></td><td></td><td>2</td><td>18</td><td>12</td><td></td><td>14</td><td>9</td><td></td><td>55</td></tr><tr><td>INCOFT</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>13</td><td>40</td><td>1</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>ICDT</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>5</td><td>46</td><td>51</td></tr><tr><td>ICERECT</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>23</td><td>25</td><td>2</td><td>50</td></tr><tr><td>ICPSITIAGS</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>48</td><td></td><td>48</td></tr><tr><td>ICCSP</td><td>6</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>10</td><td>11</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>9</td><td>48</td></tr><tr><td>PEEIC</td><td></td><td></td><td>1</td><td>4</td><td>1</td><td></td><td></td><td>34</td><td>6</td><td>46</td></tr><tr><td>ICIRCA</td><td></td><td></td><td>12</td><td>1</td><td>8</td><td>15</td><td>10</td><td></td><td></td><td>46</td></tr><tr><td>ICESC</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>8</td><td>12</td><td>21</td><td>3</td><td>1</td><td>45</td></tr><tr><td>ICICT (1)</td><td></td><td></td><td>1</td><td></td><td>13</td><td>16</td><td>7</td><td>6</td><td></td><td>43</td></tr><tr><td>AIMLA</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>43</td><td>43</td></tr><tr><td>MACS</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>1</td><td></td><td></td><td>8</td><td>31</td><td></td><td>40</td></tr></tbody></table>

long-term analyses have shown that institutional pressures and collaboration patterns contribute significantly to misconduct and subsequent retractions [24]. These include the weight of quantitative performance evaluations that prioritize publication counts over quality, the vulnerability of private institutions often competing for visibility, and the tendency for misconduct to concentrate in collaborations lacking strong oversight mechanisms. Together, these mechanisms illustrate how local academic ecosystems can amplify questionable practices and shape the geography of retractions, aligning with broader evidence that geographical disparities in problematic publishing practices result from a combination of systemic and contextual factors rather than publication volume alone.

## F. Focus on the IEEE Conference ICOCWC 2024

To try to better understand how tortured articles appeared in the literature, we studied one specific event. The first edition of the *International Conference on Optical and Wireless Technologies* (ICOCWC) took place in 2024 in Debre Tabor, Ethiopia. Its proceedings have been published on the IEEE

Xplore platform.<fnref n="6" /> They contain 330 documents, six of which were excluded from our analysis because they were not articles but copyright notices, programs, or lists of participants. In addition, 15 expressions of concerns were attached to the proceedings on IEEEXplore.

Figure 4 presents the distribution of articles by the number of detected tortured phrases. Among the 309 articles, more than half (183 articles, 59%) contain either at least five tortured phrases or a single blatantly tortured one (e.g., 'artificial brainpower' instead of 'artificial intelligence'). If we broaden the scope to include all articles with at least one tortured phrase, the proportion rises to 79% (245 out of 309 articles).

We also identified 291 tortured phrases that appeared repeatedly across multiple articles, highlighting a high degree of textual redundancy. This repetition of specific suspicious formulations suggests the possible involvement of paper mills or automatic text generation processes.

In addition to content-related signals, structural red flags were observed regarding the conference's organization. The

<footnote n="6">⁶https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOCWC60930.2024</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Number of articles per amount of tortured phrases from ICOCWC2024 articles matching 5+ tortured phrases or 1+ obvious tortured phrases flagged in the PPS</figcaption></figure>

<table><caption>TABLE III
TOP 20 COUNTRIES OF AUTHORS* FROM THE TORTURED ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN IEEE PROCEEDINGS.</caption><thead><tr><td>Authors' Country</td><td>Tortured Articles Count</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>India</td><td>3289</td></tr><tr><td>China</td><td>159</td></tr><tr><td>Iraq</td><td>89</td></tr><tr><td>United States of America</td><td>84</td></tr><tr><td>Bengladesh</td><td>63</td></tr><tr><td>Pakistan</td><td>58</td></tr><tr><td>Malaysia</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td>Turkey</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td>Saudi Arabia</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>United Arab Emirates</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>Indonesia</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Ethiopia</td><td>18</td></tr><tr><td>Oman</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>Uzbekistan</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>Egypt</td><td>11</td></tr><tr><td>United Kingdom</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>France</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Iran</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>South Korea</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>Australia</td><td>7</td></tr></tbody></table>

organizing committee was composed of 34 individuals, several of whom held key scientific roles. Among them, 6 were authors or editors of 31 articles commented on PubPeer. Out of these, 21 articles have been retracted. The PubPeer comments document a variety of integrity issues, such as the sale of authorship on Telegram, biased referencing practices,

plagiarism, nonsensical equations, and tortured phrases such as 'savvy vehicle' instead of 'smart vehicle' or 'cerebral torment' instead of 'headache'. We also checked the reviewers listed in the conference proceedings. Out of 134 reviewers identified, 31 were associated with at least one PubPeer-flagged article, and 8 are connected to 3 or more such articles. Table V summarizes the known PubPeer alerts related to both the conference organizers and reviewers, as of 19 February 2025.

This IEEE ICOCWC'24 case highlights some of the most striking inconsistencies detected by our system. Beyond these observations, several broader concerns emerge regarding the limitations of our method, the reputational and scientific impact of retracted IEEE proceedings, particularly regarding the credibility of the venues and their selection processes. We discuss these in the next section.

## IV. DISCUSSION

### A. Limitations and Scope of the Study

Our study focuses exclusively on the identification of tortured phrases in scientific proceedings. While this provides a useful lens to identify some questionable content, it only scratches the surface of broader scientific misconduct. Tortured articles are often manufactured and sold by unscrupulous organizations called 'paper mills' [25-27]. Paper mills offer not only writing services (using plagiarism and data falsification or fabrication) but also citation manipulation [28] to boost the article's perceived credibility, and authorship for sale [29]: individuals without any genuine contribution to the research are listed as co-authors. Our method cannot detect these other types of misconduct.

<footnote>*Each article is counted once for each country appearing in its authors' affiliations.</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE IV
COUNTRIES HAVING MORE TORTURED ARTICLES IN IEEE CONFERENCES
COMPARED TO THE AVERAGE RATE OF TORTURED ARTICLES IN OUR DATASET (2.4%).</caption><thead><tr><th>Country</th><th># tortured articles</th><th>Total articles in our dataset</th><th>Share of tortured articles (%)</th><th>Difference with average rate (%pt)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Ethiopia</td><td>22</td><td>328</td><td>6.7</td><td>+4.3</td></tr><tr><td>Iraq</td><td>131</td><td>2880</td><td>4.5</td><td>+2.1</td></tr><tr><td>Peru</td><td>13</td><td>301</td><td>4.3</td><td>+1.9</td></tr><tr><td>India</td><td>4889</td><td>139 000</td><td>3.5</td><td>+1.1</td></tr><tr><td>Pakistan</td><td>86</td><td>2796</td><td>3.1</td><td>+0.7</td></tr><tr><td>Oman</td><td>16</td><td>564</td><td>2.8</td><td>+0.4</td></tr><tr><td>Saudi Arabia</td><td>51</td><td>1819</td><td>2.8</td><td>+0.4</td></tr><tr><td>Uzbekistan</td><td>20</td><td>746</td><td>2.7</td><td>+0.3</td></tr><tr><td>United Arab Emirates</td><td>44</td><td>1774</td><td>2.5</td><td>+0.1</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><caption>TABLE V
NUMBER OF ARTICLES LINKED TO ICOCWC 2024 ORGANIZERS OR REVIEWERS AND FLAGGED ON PUBPEER FOR POTENTIAL BREACHES OF SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY (NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS IN PARENTHESES).</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Role in ICOCWC 2024<br>Role in article flagged on PubPeer</th><th colspan="3">Organizing Committee</th><th colspan="2">Reviewers</th><th rowspan="2">Total</th></tr><tr><th>Editor</th><th>1<sup>st</sup> author</th><th>Co-author</th><th>1<sup>st</sup> author</th><th>Co-author</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Retracted articles</td><td>17 (3)</td><td></td><td>4 (3)</td><td>5 (4)</td><td>4 (4)</td><td>30 (12)</td></tr><tr><td>Expressions of concern</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>2 (2)</td><td>6 (6)</td><td>8 (8)</td></tr><tr><td>Other PubPeer alerts without editorial consequence</td><td>3 (2)</td><td>1 (1)</td><td>6 (5)</td><td>9 (9)</td><td>41 (25)</td><td>60 (35)</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>20 (3)</td><td>1 (1)</td><td>10 (5)</td><td>16 (13)</td><td>51 (28)</td><td>98 (38)</td></tr></tbody></table>

In addition, our catalog of tortured phrases is bent toward engineering and health sciences, potentially biasing detection in other fields. These limitations call for the development of complementary tools—both automatic and manual—to detect a wider range of irregularities. The recent development of generative AI based on large language models also compli-cates the detection of these tortured articles: generative AI is much more efficient at generating well-written non-tortured sentences [30].

## B. Recurring Questionable Content in IEEE Conferences

Beyond linguistic anomalies, our findings converge with broader concerns regarding the publication of pseudo-scientific content in reputable venues. As noted in a recent blog post by Solal Pirelli [31], IEEE published articles advocating for astrology-based AI, perpetual motion machines, and dubious psychological constructs like Myers-Briggs personality type testing. These recurring problems suggest a deeper issue—namely, that editorial failures are not isolated accidents, but potentially symptoms of systemic vulnerabilities in peer review.

The persistence of problematic articles across years, even after multiple alerts [20, 21, 32], raises the question of how such content can be tolerated within academic publishing. Fanelli argued that scientific misconduct may be less the product of exceptional fraud and more a reflection of banal, systemic tolerance for questionable practices [5]. This systemic tolerance is reinforced by structural constraints: major conferences may receive thousands of submissions but can only accept a few hundred, making it practically impossible to conduct thorough reviews of all contributions within the short timelines imposed. Such conditions partly explain why

publishers and organizers often fail to take meaningful action, even when faced with recurring evidence of low-quality or manipulated content.

## C. Few Retractions

Despite the growing awareness of anomalies in proceedings, retractions remain scarce. As early as 2023, experts flagged hundreds of problematic articles at IEEE conferences, ranging from plagiarism to citation fraud. However, only a tiny fraction of these were officially retracted. This discrepancy is troubling, especially given that some problematic articles include blatant signs of machine generation, such as mentions of ‘Regenerate response’ from ChatGPT [33], without triggering corrective action. This points to a systemic gap between anomaly detection and tangible correction of the literature. Our analysis confirms this inertia: among thousands of suspicious articles detected, only 158 have been formally withdrawn as of April 2025. On 2 September 2025, the day [21] was published, IEEE retracted all articles published in the proceedings of ICOCWC’24.

## D. Impact of Generative AI

Tortured phrases are created by an algorithm replacing some words by synonyms in the text given as input. This process generates nonsensical text. With the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI gained in popularity. The texts generated with these technologies do not contain tortured phrases. Several studies showed that scientists used these tools for their work [34], in computer science [35] but also in other fields such as mathematics, biomedicine, and others [36, 37]. Plagiarists will likely replace text spinners (producing tortured phrases) by generative AI. And yet, 2024 saw a rise in
tortured articles compared to 2023 (see Figure 5), suggesting that tortured phrases are still used to commit synonym-based plagiarism. In the age of Generative AI, screening the published literature *and* incoming manuscripts for tortured phrases remains critical.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Number of tortured articles flagged by the PPS per year, as of November 2025. We considered here only articles containing at least 5 tortured phrases.</figcaption></figure>

## V. CONCLUSION

In this study, we analyzed the phenomenon of tortured phrases: awkward textual reformulations likely produced by paraphrasing software. By focusing on conference proceedings, we identified patterns of ‘tortured conferences’ occurring year after year, and conferences with abnormally high concentrations of tortured articles. We analyzed the most striking conference in our dataset, ICOCWC’24, which accepted 84% of articles containing tortured phrases (260 out of 309 articles).

While tortured phrases are a visible symptom, they point to deeper problems in scholarly communication: editorial laxity, failures of peer-review, and perverse incentives to publish at all costs. The current system too often tolerates plagiarism, even when evidence piles up with several tortured phrases. Retractions remain rare, and problematic conferences keep being held year after year. When left unchecked, these trends erode trust in scientific knowledge, especially in fields like computer science where proceedings are central.

Ultimately, strengthening quality control requires a systemic response: more robust peer-review mechanisms to flag unreliable publications, transparent editorial policies, and an institutional culture that prioritizes integrity over quantity. Without such changes, the academic landscape remains vulnerable—not just to tortured phrases, but to tortured science. Beyond identifying specific anomalies, our work invites the community to reflect on structural weaknesses in the digital publication process and the urgent need for coordinated responses. It is a

call for vigilance, not only from authors, but also publishers, institutions, and conference organizers.

## DATA AVAILABILITY

Additional data is available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17590350.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank Digital Science for providing us free access to the Dimensions API. GC acknowledges the NanoBubbles project that has received Synergy grant funding from the European Research Council (ERC), within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, grant agreement no. 951393 (https://doi.org/10.3030/951393).

The authors acknowledge that artificial intelligence tools were used solely for translation assistance and LaTeX formatting. No part of the research design, analysis, or interpretation relied on AI systems.

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