An international computing society has begun retracting conference papers for “citation falsification” only months after the sleuth who flagged the suspect articles was convicted for defamation in a lawsuit filed by one of the offending authors. So far, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has pulled at least 27 of the papers, but dozens more remain, according to Solal Pirelli, a software engineer in Lausanne, Switzerland, who raised concerns about the articles more than two years ago. Some of the proceedings allegedly include plagiarized works, while others are plagued by citation stuffing.

The retraction notices from September 10, 2025 state: "The authors have violated the ACM Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification by engaging in citation falsification by co-authoring works containing an extremely large percentage of unnecessary self-citations, including citations that were not used as references in the work."

The society would not answer specific questions about the dubious conference proceedings. But Scott Delman, ACM’s director of publications, agreed "investigations take far too long to conduct" and said it was a "high priority" for the group to devote more resources to investigations.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/11/17/association-computing-machinery-retractions-citation-falsification-sleuth-defamation/

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