1,417 Papers Pulled in One Day Match Ads Selling Authorship Slots
How an authorship slot is advertised, matched to a published title and detected, what the retraction leaves out, and a short recipe for checking a paper you cited.
Call for author positions.
Conference accepted papers available.
Add your name in research paper.
Those are phrases the authors of a recent study quote from advertisements on social media, and in the ads the price of a first-author slot could start as low as $43.
On Friday, Oct. 23, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) retracted at least 1,417 conference papers whose titles matched advertisements of that kind. That is the count Nature's news team says it verified. IEEE announced the move on Wednesday, Oct. 28. As trade outlets relay its statement, IEEE put the number at approximately 1,400 papers and did not list them.
The match came from a study, first posted as a preprint (a paper not yet peer reviewed) on Apr. 24, 2026, and published this month in the journal Accountability in Research, according to Nature. Read it as a clean-up of papers one study could trace to adverts, not a measure of how many IEEE conference papers are bad.
A slot on an unpublished paper cost between $11 and $400
IEEE's statement and the trade write-ups of it said little about the mechanism, and it is simpler than the phrase "authorship for sale" suggests. The study, by Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin, Marie Kunešová of the University of West Bohemia, Yagmur Ozturk and Solal Pirelli, defines the practice as "adding someone as an author of a paper they did not write in exchange for money."
A seller posts an advert on one of more than 200 channels on Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and similar services. The study says the combined audience of those channels exceeds 600,000. A typical post names a publisher, promises Scopus indexing, gives a tentative title or keywords, and lists slots, often with a price for each. The number of slots is "usually six," and quoted publication times run from 1 to 6 months.
Why six? The authors suspect it is because the author list at the top of an IEEE Xplore page showed only the first six names at the time of the study. That is a suspicion, not a finding.
Prices, according to both Nature and the preprint, ran from $43 to $400 for a first-author slot and from $11 to $200 for a last-author slot. Taking every slot on a paper at once cost $217 to $750, the preprint says.
The ads pitch conferences as the route to print. Nature reports that local organizing committees handle submissions and peer review, and IEEE then publishes the final proceedings. Abalkina told Nature that such submissions are not subject to the same integrity checks that IEEE journal submissions undergo, and that conference papers are "fast to publish" and often indexed in scholarly databases. She described the market this way:
"Paper mills are a public market and the offers for sale are public on social media. Anyone can find them. Anyone can buy. Anyone can trace [them]."
Anna Abalkina, research-integrity sleuth and social scientist at the Free University of Berlin, co-author of the study, quoted by Nature
The researchers only observed the messages and, in their words, "did not solicit any offers."
The match was a title against an advertisement
The team collected 5,684 offers, which boiled down to 4,407 unique titles or keyword sets, posted between Feb. 23, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2025. They then compared those with published IEEE papers using what they call "semi-automated methods along with human assessment." The output was 2,062 papers in 366 proceedings, published from 2021 to 2026: 1,913 classed "definitely" a match, 149 "probably," and 1,509 (73%) with a title that exactly matched the offer.
That is the limit of the method. It matches a title to an advert. It does not establish who sold or who took a slot, and a listed co-author is not shown to have taken a slot. Most authors appear on only one flagged paper, though 60 appear on 10 or more.
Geography is lopsided. Of 109 conferences with five or more matched papers, 95 took place in India, and 93% of the identified papers list India among the countries of their authors, according to the study's Dimensions data. The authors caution that "this study should not be interpreted as evidence that other countries are immune." They did not search Chinese-language platforms because none of the authors reads Chinese, so the data say nothing about China.
Some conferences stand out. At IC3I 2022 the study identified 95 papers, up to 23.51% of the conference's output. Of 48 conferences with at least 10 flagged papers and an archived website, 13 took 10 days or fewer from submission to acceptance, the shortest 3 days. Neither Nature nor IEEE has said these were among the retracted papers.
The 0.06% depends on a denominator IEEE has not published
IEEE says it got here through "an external study," then ran its own review and found the papers violated "IEEE's publication principles." The retraction notices for all 1,417, and for another 7 with no clear retraction date, say the articles "may have been offered for sale," per Nature. The wording does not say who offered them or who took them.
As Research Information reports it, IEEE said it used new technology and advanced screening methods and finished the retractions within months of becoming aware of the concerns. From preprint (Apr. 24) to retraction was 182 days.
IEEE also said the affected papers "represent less than 0.06% of conference publications for the six-year period." Nature reports IEEE publishes around 350,000 conference papers a year, and Research Information's copy says "more than 350,000." Six years at 350,000 is 2,100,000 papers, and 1,417 of those is 0.0675%, which is above 0.06%.
To land under 0.06%, the six-year total would have to exceed about 2.36 million papers, or about 394,000 a year. That is not a contradiction. IEEE said "more than" 350,000, and none of the coverage gives IEEE's denominator, so a reader cannot reproduce the figure. The percentage tells you how small the batch is against IEEE's whole output, and nothing about how many of the other papers are sound.
Then there is what the retraction does not reach. Nature's cross-check of the study's dataset against the Problematic Paper Screener, created by Guillaume Cabanac of the University of Toulouse, found 1,622 of the 2,062 flagged papers now retracted. That leaves 440 not retracted by Nature's count, 21.3% of the flagged set. The Oct. 23 batch covers 68.7%, and everything retracted so far gets to 78.7%.
Those 440 are not a verdict that the papers are fine; Nature's count simply shows no retraction. In the preprint's second version (Aug. 11), 66 of the 2,062 were already retracted.
Now the silence. Neither Nature's report nor the coverage of IEEE's statement says IEEE listed the 1,417 papers, which is why Nature had to identify them by cross-checking with the study. Nor does any of it name the conferences or give IEEE's denominator. IEEE's own page was not checked for this piece. None of the published material says whether IEEE tells authors who cited a retracted paper, whether authors or sponsoring IEEE sections were sanctioned, or whether authors can appeal this time. In 2015 the notices offered an appeal route. Nature says it contacted IEEE and that "No reply to our questions was received by the time this article was published," and a representative referred it to the public statement.
A Retraction Watch report from June 25, 2015 shows what a 2015 IEEE notice said: "Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper."
Checking a paper takes a DOI and two lookups
If you have cited an IEEE conference paper, a few checks take minutes. None proves a paper is sound.
- Find the DOI (the permanent identifier printed on the paper's page) for the paper you cite.
- Open its IEEE Xplore page and see whether it carries a retraction notice; Nature reports that the notices say the articles "may have been offered for sale."
- Query Crossref. The Retraction Watch database, which Crossref acquired in September 2023 and made public, "is updated every working day." Crossref's documentation explains the two routes: its REST API, using a filter on update-type:retraction, or a CSV file in a git repository.
- If you use a reference manager, Retraction Watch announced in 2019 that Zotero, working with it, flags retracted papers in a library and warns when you try to cite one.
- Do not read an absence as clearance. By Nature's count, 440 flagged papers were not retracted, and the study's authors say more matches keep appearing.
What the batch changes is real but narrow: 1,417 papers are retracted, each with a notice, Nature reports. On anything published, it does not identify who sold or took a slot, name the conferences, or tell the people who cited the papers.
The authors of the study wrote that the number of matching papers "will be even higher" than 2,062, and at least 28 new potential matches appeared in the first 15 days of July 2026 alone. The coverage of IEEE's statement does not say whether a list will follow. Until one does, the ads were public when the researchers collected them, the retractions are public, and the link between them was drawn by outside researchers and a news team.
