Sunday, October 4, 2009

Suspicious Chinese ICT Conferences

A colleague was bragging that he had a paper accepted at an international IEEE conference in China. Since IEEE has often been found to support so-called bogus or fake conferences (ones that accept any paper, even those generated by SciGen) and since I was on vacation with internet access and time on my hands, I decided to have a look.

IEEE has a site that can be used to search for conferences, so I looked for conferences in Beijing in 2009. Amazing, there are 23 IEEE conferences this year in Beijing! Okay, China is a large country. I idly flicked through a few of them, when I realized that the contact person for an number of them was given as Prof. Mengqi Zhou.

More research turned him up as Chairman of the IEEE Beijing Section, and 10 of the 23 conferences listed him as the contact. Now I was really curious, so I spent a good bit of time researching the conferences. Some appear to be legitimate - they have a venue listed on their web page, they have a small range of topics listed, there is someone more or less serious-sounding as the contact.

But others are mighty strange indeed. There are dysfunctional web sites, no venues listed. And from October 16-18, 18-20, 21-23 there are three large conferences listed at the Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, with a fourth from 6-8 Nov. The contact for all four conferences is the same person, Weining Wang. Three of the four have identical registration prices and registration forms - only the dates and names of the conferences have been changed and are in a different font. The fourth one has a dysfunctional web page. Here is the data that I collected during my research:

Conference, Venue according to IEEEDatesURLPartici-
pants
Review timeReg. DeadlinePrice
Reg/Page
Comment
2009 IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI), Convention Center, Tsinghua University26-28 Jun 2009[1] 1508 weeks?$400Seems okay, smallish topics, PC online. Program online, Directions to university online
2009 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCSIT 2009), Beijing Convention Center8-11 Aug 2009[2]350???No web site any more, just notice that proceedings have been sent to authors already. Contact address is given at a Chinese news/freemail account.
2009 9th International Conference on Electronic Measurement & Instruments (ICEMI 2009), Beihang University16 Aug - 19 Aug 2009[3]2702 weeksJune 30, 2009
Chinese news/freemail account. No information on venue on web site except for advertising for "Hot Spring Liesure [sic] City"
2009 IEEE Youth Conference on Information, Computing and Telecommunication (YC-ICT 2009), Gradute University of Chinese 20-21 Sep 2009[4]2004 weeksAug 30, 2009$300IEEE e-mail contact, Hotels listed on web site, Google map to hotel
2009 Fourth International Conference on Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications (BIC-TA 2009), Shaoyuan Guest House Peking University16-19 Oct 2009[5]1205 weeksJune 30$430Venue given, functional web site, gmail contact
2009 IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology and Applications (ICCTA), Hotelecom Hotel16-18 Oct 2009[6]1503 1/2 weeksJuly 20$400 / $50Only one page functions on home page. E-Mail Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang).
Registration form identical to [7] and [10]
2009 2nd IEEE International Conference on Broadband Network & Multimedia Technology (IC-BNMT 2009), High-Tech Mansion BUPT18-20 Oct 2009[7]2003 1/2 weeksJuly 20$400 / $50E-Mail contact Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang).
Registration form identical to [6] and [10]
2009 IEEE 16th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IE&EM 2009), Beijing Union University21-23 Oct 2009[8]3001 weekJune 25404 errorNo venue information on site, Program still "under construction", Contact is a yahoo address, many topics, foreigners can submit later
2009 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna, Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless Communications (MAPE 2009), Jingyan Hotel27-29 Oct 2009[9]3504 1/2 weeksJune 10$495 / $60Contact at Beijing Jiaotong University, Venue online, Wide range of topics,
"Each article should be within 4 pages, otherwise USD60 will be charged per page of the extra pages of your article. The first author who has 2 papers should pay one registration fee and USD60 per page of the second paper."
2009 IEEE International Conference on Network Infrastructure and Digital Content (IC-NIDC 2009), Academic Communication Center, BUPT 6-8 Nov 2009[10]1803 1/2 weeksAug 15$400 / $50E-Mail contact Beijing University of Posts and Telekommunications, wnwang@bupt.edu.cn (Weining Wang). Registration form identical to [6] and [7], Registration venue given as Beijing Hotelecom Hotel.

Ms. Weining Wang is listed as the Director of Academic Office, BUPT. She also appears to be the contact for IEEE NLP-EK 2007, IEEE IC-NLP 2005, China-Ireland International Conference on ICT (CIICT2008), the 19th International Teletraffic Congress ITC19, The Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium 2008, ICHS 08, and is Deputy Editor-In-Chief of the Elsevier-published "Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications". Maybe she is the one in the office that speaks English, but I find this mighty strange.

I believe that the conferences [6], [7] and [10] are bogus conferences. [2], [3], and [8] are questionable.

Am I being paranoid here? I wrote to the IEEE president when I published my blog entry on fake conferences, but received no reply. Comments?

8 comments:

  1. In my experience being sponsored by IEEE is not a quality indicator for a conference on computer science. While there are some high-quality IEEE-sponsored conferences, there are also many with very low quality. It seems that nobody really cares about quality at IEEE (at least regarding computer science). ACM-sponsored conferences on the other hand seem to be consistently of high quality.

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  2. I am looking forward to any update of this interesting finding. Honestly speaking, it is quite normal that they hold conferences to earn money and offer graduate students opportunities to color their vita. Just a guess.

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  3. But are conferences supposed to be about earning money and padding one's vita? Or are they to be about a scientific exchange of ideas? I used to think the latter. If it is the former, then we as universities should save our money and make our people stay home.

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  4. they are absolutely wrong, conferences should be places for paper discussions or idea exchanges. What I said about "it's normal" was just to make fun of them..... Sorry for my confusing words.

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  5. I believe that IEEE Conferences in Automatic Control in Mediterranean Countries are bogus. They have accepted many times fake papers generated by SCIgen web site.

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  6. I participated in many IEEE Conferences in Malaysia and Singapore. I published 8 common papers and I had never received any comment, any remark, any question from IEEE, except sometime in 2011, that I got some minor remark about the format of my paper. These IEEE Conferences in Malaysia and Singapore are of dubious quality and maybe they are good schemes for making money for their organizers. We call them bogus, fake.

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  7. Most of the fake IAENG Conferences are organized in China, Korea, Hong-Kong etc... They are bogus and fake and it is a typical game of ph.d. candidates and M.sc. Students to send SCIgen papers to IAENG and to receive from IAENG letter of acceptance. Why don't IAENG establish a peer review system? Why does IAENG continue running fake bogus conferences. I am sure that the owner of IAENG is not an academician, maybe he is a teacher in a secondary school....

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  8. I would like to report fake ACM conferencesSeptember 26, 2013 at 7:40:00 PM GMT+2

    I am afraid that many ACM, yes ACM (Association for Computing Machinery, www.acm.org) are also bogus and fake. I can prove it very easily. So far, in many ACM conferences the review is carried out only on the Abstract. See this link from ACM site:
    http://www.sigchi.org/publications/chipubform
    They have more than 50% of their conferences non-refereed
    Search the word "non-refereed" inside this web page: http://www.sigchi.org/publications/chipubform
    Do you agree now that ACM Conferences are fake conferences? Google also: ACM Fake Conferences or Google: ACM Bogus Conferences

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