# Tortured Phrases as a Sign of Possible Misconduct in Proceedings From an Engineering Conference

Wendeline Swart, Guillaume Cabanac, Ophélie Fraisier-Vannier

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Wendeline Swart, Guillaume Cabanac, Ophélie Fraisier-Vannier. Tortured Phrases as a Sign of Possible Misconduct in Proceedings From an Engineering Conference. PRC'25: 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, Sep 2025, Chicago, United States. . [hal-05273034](https://hal.science/hal-05273034v1)

HAL Id: hal-05273034

https://hal.science/hal-05273034v1

Submitted on 22 Sep 2025

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<table><thead><tr><th>Tortured Phrases (found)</th><th>Established Phrases (expected)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Synthetic intelligence (AI)</td><td>Artificial intelligence (AI)</td></tr><tr><td>Fake superb</td><td>False positive</td></tr><tr><td>Amino corrosive</td><td>Amino acid</td></tr><tr><td>Squared blunder</td><td>(mean) Squared error</td></tr><tr><td>Uncooked scientific picture</td><td>Raw medical image</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th>Conference</th><th>Year</th><th>Tortured articles</th><th>Publisher</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>AIP Conference Proceedings</td><td>2024</td><td>223</td><td>AIP Publishing</td></tr><tr><td>ICOCWC'24</td><td>2024</td><td>191</td><td>IEEE</td></tr><tr><td>Materials Today Proceedings</td><td>2021</td><td>177</td><td>ELSEVIER</td></tr><tr><td>Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems</td><td>2022</td><td>168</td><td>Springer</td></tr><tr><td>International Journal of Engineering & Technology</td><td>2018</td><td>112</td><td>THE SCIENCE PUBLISHING HOUSE</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th>Flagged Articles</th><th>Organizing Committee (34 individuals)</th><th>Reviewers (134 individuals)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Articles with expressions of concerns</td><td>31 articles:<ul><li>tortured phrases,</li><li>suspicion of authorship for sale purchase of an authorship position,</li><li>plagiarized sections,</li><li>nonsensical equations,</li><li>irrelevant references.</li></ul></td><td>67 articles commented upon on PubPeer for integrity issues, 8 have an expression of concern</td></tr><tr><td>Retracted articles</td><td>21 articles</td><td>9 articles</td></tr></tbody></table>

### Design

We used the [Problematic Paper Screener (PPS)](https://www ProblematicPaperScreener PPS) [1] to identify conference proceedings containing tortured articles: with 5+ tortured phrases, or <5 and assessed by a human.

We selected the conference ICOCWC'24 with the largest number of tortured articles. We probed the production of the experts listed in its proceedings with the bibliometric platform [Dimensions](https://www dimensions) and the post-publication peer review platform [PubPeer](https://www pubpeer).

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Problematic Paper Screener

Est. February 27th, 2021

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Dimensions

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PUBPEER

The online journal club

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### Conclusion

* IEEE tagged with an expression of concern 15 of 260 (6%) of articles flagged by the PPS (with a mean of 4 tortured phrases per article).

* Human reassessment should be considered for many of the 20,066 PPS-flagged articles.

### Reference

[1] Cabanac G, Labbé C, Magazinov A. The 'Problematic Paper Screener' automatically selects suspect publications for post-publication (re)assessment. Abstract presented at WCRI 2022: 7th World Conference on Research Integrity; 29 May – 1 June 2022; Cape Town, South Africa. (2022). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.04895