Today, we will look at Computer Science Journals and Conferences that have the largest number of retracted or withdrawn articles in 2023. A paper can be withdrawn for various reasons such as plagiarism, papers with fake results, conflict of interests, or a compromised review process.
Methodology
To check the number of withdrawn or retracted papers from computer science journals for a given year, I searched in the DBLP database using the following query (access = withdrawn, year = 2023):
https://dblp.org/search/publ?q=access%3Awithdrawn%3A%20year%3A2023%3A
Thus, I only consider journal and conferences that are indexed in DBLP, which covers the best journals and conferences in computer science.
Results for 2023
For 2023, there are 911 withdrawn papers, with 494 papers from ArxIv. The papers from ArxIv do not count as formal publications and are thus ignored. From the remaining papers, the results are shown in the table below for journal or conferences with at least 2 withdrawn papers.
| Number | Journal Name | Publication Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Soft Comput. | 133 |
| 2 | Multim. Tools Appl. | 37 |
| 3 | J. Comb. Optim. | 30 |
| 4 | Int. J. Comput. Intell. Syst. | 21 |
| 5 | IET Softw. | 21 |
| 6 | EURASIP J. Wirel. Commun. Netw. | 17 |
| 7 | J. Robotics | 16 |
| 8 | Int. J. Syst. Assur. Eng. Manag. | 10 |
| 9 | Inf. Syst. E Bus. Manag. | 10 |
| 10 | IET Commun. | 9 |
| 11 | Electron. Commer. Res. | 9 |
| 12 | J. Electronic Imaging | 8 |
| 13 | J. Electr. Comput. Eng. | 7 |
| 14 | Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. | 6 |
| 15 | IET Circuits Devices Syst. | 5 |
| 16 | Distributed Parallel Databases | 4 |
| 17 | J. Supercomput. | 4 |
| 18 | EURASIP J. Inf. Secur. | 3 |
| 19 | IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch. | 3 |
| 20 | Neural Comput. Appl. | 3 |
| 21 | Neural Process. Lett. | 3 |
| 22 | Intell. Serv. Robotics | 3 |
| 23 | CVPR | 3 |
| 24 | J. Comput. Virol. Hacking Tech. | 3 |
| 25 | Clust. Comput. | 2 |
| 26 | J. Intell. Fuzzy Syst. | 2 |
| 27 | Ann. Oper. Res. | 2 |
| 28 | J. Inf. Sci. | 2 |
| 29 | NeuroImage | 2 |
| 30 | Appl. Intell. | 2 |
| 31 | Remote. Sens. | 2 |
| 32 | Stud Logica | 2 |
| 33 | Int. J. Comput. Math. | 2 |
| 34 | Behav. Inf. Technol. | 2 |
| 35 | Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell. | 2 |
| 36 | Educ. Inf. Technol. | 2 |
| 37 | Wirel. Pers. Commun. | 2 |
From this table, we can make a few interesting observations.
First, the largest number of withdrawn papers is by far in the Soft Computing journal of Springer with 133 papers. To try to understand what is going on with this journal, I clicked the first 5 withdrawn journal papers from Soft Computing to see the reasons. The reasons were basically all the same:
“The publisher has retracted this article in agreement with the Editor-in-Chief. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation’s findings the publisher no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article.”
In other words, several withdrawn papers from that journal seems to have been in guest special issues.
To go further in this analysis, we can compare to the previous years. I see that there were only 6 withdrawn papers in Soft Computing in 2022, 22 in 2021 but 76 in 2020. Thus, there seems to be quite a large amount in this journal with some big variations over the years, but in 2023, it has truly sky rocketed with 133.
By searching further, I can see that the Soft Computing journal is now “On hold” in terms of indexing in the SCI list of journals as of 2024/09/09. This means that this journal has been temporarily expelled from the list as a kind of punishment.
Now, let’s look at the second journal with the most withdrawn papers, which is Multimedia Tools and Applications with 37 papers, and is also published by Springer. The first five retracted papers were withdrawn for the following reasons:
- “An investigation by the publisher found a number of concerns, including but not limited to citations which do not support claims made in the text, non-standard phrasing, and image irregularities.” (4 times)
- “The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns” (1 time)
So, in this case, again the problem of papers in special issues occur, but also the problem of papers with irregularities.
I can see that the Multimedia Tools and Applications has also been put “On hold” in terms of indexing in the SCI list of journals as of 2024/09/09.
Now after that, the third journal with the most withdrawn papers is Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, also published by Springer with 30 papers, then the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems of Springer with 21 papers.
Thus, first four journals with the most retracted papers are from Springer. Then, the fifth journal is from Wiley.
Another interesting observation that we can make from this analysis is that CVPR is perhaps the only conference that shows up in this list with 3 withdrawn papers. This is quite surprising as CVPR is a top conference in the field of computer vision.
Thus, I have checked to see what are the reason(s) and it is “IEEE removed this article due to lack of legal authorization for its publication”. I think that this means that the authors did not fill the copyright form for this conference.
Conclusion
I hope that this blog post has been interesting.
For researchers, I recommend to avoid submitting to the journals that have been put “On hold” until the situation for these journals returns to normal. This is to ensure that your papers are indexed in SCI.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!
