One Facebook ad touted authorship spots on a conference paper, all to be published at conferences run by the nonprofit computer science and engineering society IEEE. For the equivalent of about $64, a buyer could be the paper’s fifth author; for $87, first author. And that ad is just one of hundreds.

Now, a new study, posted 11 August, 2026 on the arXiv preprint server by social scientist Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin and colleagues, reports that such ads appear to have plenty of takers among IEEE conference participants: Out of 4407 unique paper titles listed in ads from 2021 to ’25, nearly half, or 2062, matched papers later published. These are just a small fraction of the 300,000 conference papers IEEE publishes each year, but some meetings may be particularly vulnerable. At IEEE conferences that published at least 25 such papers, they made up more than 10% of all the meeting’s articles, and at three of those conferences, more than 20%.

The researchers focused on ads mentioning IEEE because of the publisher’s history of retracting conference papers because of research integrity problems. These retractions have calculated total more than 17,000 since 2002, exceed those of any other publisher.
 

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/hundreds-paper-mill-papers-peddled-ads-were-later-published

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