Mock Conferences

After being forced to remove pages from my blog dealing with what I called a "fake conference" and naming a name, the lawyer who tried (unsuccessfully) to discredit me at my university wrote a "thank you" note to the university stating what a fine person I am and then tried to get me to give her some specific information. I said "No", and remembered that I wanted to revisit the topic of fake conferences. But since the name "fake" seems to be hotly contested because the conferences do tend to take place, I am now using the term "mock conference", in addition to "junk journals" and "pretend publishers" for things I want to be writing about in the near future.

What is a mock conference? Here's the discussion from one of the pages I had to remove, minus the reference to a particular conference and enhanced by points from the discussion that ensued.

I feel that a mock conference is one that has some (or all) of the following properties:

1. Has an extremely wide call for papers.  
2. Is co-located with many other conferences that are all in the same manner, but with another field, or is located in the same place a similar conference happened a few days before (see my table about the suspicious Chinese conferences from 2009). 
3. Is located in a place people would want to visit as a tourist (Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong, etc.) or even at a tourist hotel. 
4. The same person organizes multiple international conferences in one year (one national conference is enough to tire anyone). 
5. The sponsors are dodgy - for example, IEEE seems to sponsor anything that pays for the use of the logo. IEEE has, however, begun to crack down on mock conferences and has decided not to publish the proceedings from quite a number of conferences in 2010 and 2011.
6. Or the "sponsors" are just the department that specific professors are associated with, but the advertising is done with the university logo. Sometimes logos are just used without the institution involved knowing about its so-called sponsorship.
7. Even though they may brag about the number of citations they have (and in my book, if you have to announce that people have cited papers from the conference, then it is not an important conference), one needs to factor out the self-citations. These are when the author of a paper at the conference is citing own work submitted to a previous version of the conference.
8. Makes sure you pay your fee before the paper is published. Although it seems that there have been to many authors not showing up at conferences after getting a paper accepted, which rather defeats the purpose of a conference. Having paid the conference fee is supposed to increase the chance of actually presenting the paper.  
9. Offers a special deal if you "take" two papers.  
10. Accepts papers just days before the conference as long as you pay the fee.
11. Accepts papers only on the basis of an abstract. 
12. Often chooses a publisher that sounds very similar to a renowned publisher, or publishes at a print-on-demand house. Some even just publish online (but with ISBN number) to save trees.
13. Accepts papers without sending out reviews. Many of these conferences insist that they "do" peer review, but there are often no substantial comments made about the individual papers. Or the reviews only come back when explicitly requested.
14. Has many, many parallel sessions that are only sparsely attended, usually because they are on such vastly different topics.
15. The program committee of the conference is unreasonably large, e.g., more than 100 members.
16. The number of accepted papers is in the 100s.
17. Criticism is answered by lawyers instead of replying to honest criticism with openness, transparancy and actual arguments.
18. Anything else?

Panos Ipeirotis had also noted: "The way that you separate the legitimate from the fraudulent event is through the community. Unfortunately, if there are academics that form a mutual admiration clique and decide to meet once a year, exchanging citations, it is very difficult to separate an event like that from other legitimate fields that are rather insular and do not communicate much with other fields."

I hope we can continue discussing the properties of mock conferences, without resorting to names. 

Updates: Split 1. into 1. and 2. Maybe I need to start sorting the properties into categories?
Added 17. from a comment.

Interesting links on fake conferences

While researching that last posting on fake conferences I found a number of interesting sites I want to link to here:

• Diploma Mill News, a blog dedicated to "[e]xposing scammers of every ilk: diploma mills, fake diplomas, fabricated transcripts, bogus accreditation, plagiarism, cheating, essay mills, identity theft, impersonation of licensed professionals, and more."
• The State of Oregon has a long list of unaccredited schools
• Academic Spam, a blog that collects the solicitations ("If you are a pseudoscientist, then a new bogus conference is calling you to send fake papers")
• A scientific paper:  Zhuang, Z., Elmacioglu, E., Lee, D., and Giles, C. L. 2007. Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.  In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM, New York, NY, 225-234. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1255175.1255220
• Some Japanese guy has plagiarized my first article on fake conferences...
• A blacklist of conferences and journals
• A 10-page paper from CERN that has 3469 authors (!) [Did they all get money from their institutions for this publication?]

More Fake Conferences?

I had a discussion with the GI Ethics group yesterday on the topic of fake conferences. How exactly do we decide if a conference is a fake - only there to provide researchers with publications to pad their CVs and a trip to a nice place? One of our group had submitted a paper to a conference that sounded legit, but when he arrived he was shocked that most of the week was dedicated to local tours and the few papers that he heard given were either very thin, very wacko, or given in such bad English as to be incomprehensible.

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 IEEE	Dates	URL	Partici- pants	Review time	Reg. Deadline	Price Reg/Page	Comment
2009 IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI), Convention Center, Tsinghua University	26-28 Jun 2009	[1]	150	8 weeks	?	$400	Seems 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 Center	8-11 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 University	16 Aug - 19 Aug 2009	[3]	270	2 weeks	June 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]	200	4 weeks	Aug 30, 2009	$300	IEEE 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 University	16-19 Oct 2009	[5]	120	5 weeks	June 30	$430	Venue given, functional web site, gmail contact
2009 IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology and Applications (ICCTA), Hotelecom Hotel	16-18 Oct 2009	[6]	150	3 1/2 weeks	July 20	$400 / $50	Only 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 BUPT	18-20 Oct 2009	[7]	200	3 1/2 weeks	July 20	$400 / $50	E-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 University	21-23 Oct 2009	[8]	300	1 week	June 25	404 error	No 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 Hotel	27-29 Oct 2009	[9]	350	4 1/2 weeks	June 10	$495 / $60	Contact 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]	180	3 1/2 weeks	Aug 15	$400 / $50	E-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?

Fake Conferences

It's that time of year again. Suddenly, your inbox is filled with letters requesting that you submit a paper to the "The 13th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2009" or "The 6th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2008" or "The International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2008", all interestingly co-located in Orlando, Florida, and all organized by one Professor Nagib Callaos of the "International Institute of Informatics and Systemics".

Never heard of any of this because you are a philosopher getting the emails, too? Don't worry, serious computer scientists don't usually go to the conferences, although people do easily get impressed by all the names and submit a paper.

Strangely enough, all papers are accepted, as long as you have paid your registration fee. You don't actually have to come and give the paper, although the family will surely love following you to Orlando. The "Acceptance Policy" is spelled out in pseudo-scientific detail on the conference site. I paraphrase: We accept everything, because there might happen to be a good paper in there, and because a reviewer might plagiarize a paper they reject.

This conference accepted a paper back in 2005 that had been generated by a computer programmed by some MIT students, SCIgen. A nice blog discussion of that and the conference is found here. There was quite a row about this back in 2005, as one must question how scientific a conference is that accepts random (albeit well-worded) garbage and is willing to publish it. It is said that more than 1500 papers are accepted (at $ a pop that isn't chicken feed), and the "majority" are actually presented. That is not what a real conference is about, where you meet and discuss with peers working in similar areas.

How many of these thousands of papers ever get cited? That is perhaps an indication of how good the papers really are. I just searched the ACM Digital Library. There are 19 (nineteen) citations of the WMSCI conference. There have been 12 such conferences taken place.

That's not too many, so I went through the references for all 19 papers. Eleven of these papers were written by at least one of the authors of a WMSCI-published paper, so over half are self-citations. One paper is Peter G. Neumann's note of the acceptance of the fake paper in his "Risks to the Public" column in Software Engineering Notes.

As an aside, there's a fascinating paper on bibliometrics for discovering low-quality conferences published in 2007: Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.

Glancing down the lineup of invited speakers can cause quite some hilarity: Karl H. Müller, is given at CCCT2008 as being with the "University of Ljubljana (Austria)". I don't think that Austria has acutally annexed Slovenia, and a search of their web site turns up Mr. Müller as having given a talk there a few years back, but he is not listed as a teacher. He lists himself in his CV on the pages of his institute as teaching at any number of Austrian schools, but strangely, they don't list him.

Dr. Subhas C Misra is listed for this conference as being a visiting Scientist at Harvard, for another conference as being a visiting scientist at State University of New York. At another conference he is listed as the "NSERCPDF Scientist, Harvard University", but I find no mention of this program outside of his CV. Harvard includes CVs of its visiting scientists on its home page, there is no mention of Misra.

Who are these guys?

It seems that anyone can make up a fancy institute name and make themselves director, declare themselves teachers at University X (and may actually have taught there a semester or so before being put out on their ear), make up papers and fancy conferences and rush around finding themselves soooo important - but this has nothing to do with science! They can even pretend to be from some institution. Most are so large, no one can be sure that they are not actually from that place.

What can be done to stop this pseudo-science? Or do we just ignore them, but watch young people and unsuspecting colleagues pour departmental travel money into attending these conferences to present their papers? We do get a publication point out of it.....

Note (2016-11-10):  This blog entry was the begin of a long discussion. In 2012 I started speaking of "mock conferences" instead of "fake" ones. I keep getting lawyer's letters demanding that I remove this or that article because it is somehow defamatory. Please understand that science is a process, a long discussion, in which arguments are exchanged. Everyone is welcome to post comments, except those that attack a named person, and if you wish to argue your point of view I will be glad to publish guest commentary so that we can discuss it. In my opinion, having a lawyer enter a scientific conversation is akin to "Goodwin's Law": You automatically lose the argument.