Why Were 323 Papers From a Fake Conference Retracted?

Fake Conference Leads to Massive Retraction

In August 2021, the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech 2021) was held in Jakarta, Indonesia, and was supposedly sponsored by IEEE Indonesia. After the conference, ACM’s digital library published 323 papers claiming to be from this event.

It was later discovered that the conference was a counterfeit operation with no legitimate peer review, and the papers were published without the organizers’ consent.

We have never collaborated with ACM, nor have we been part of ACM’s digital library publishing. These 323 papers were published under our name on ACM, with fabricated conference details such as name, location, date, and committee.

The organizers of ICIMTech 2021 issued an official statement confirming the fraud and emphasizing that the conference follows high‑quality international standards and IEEE publishing norms.

Most authors of the retracted papers were Chinese, including scholars from top‑tier universities as well as lesser‑known institutions, and the topics spanned a wide range, from big‑data‑based student affairs management to AI applications in environmental design.

ACM quickly retracted all 323 papers, noting that similar large‑scale retractions have occurred before and expressing surprise at how the papers passed peer review. ACM clarified that it does not take responsibility for the peer‑review process, which lies with the conference organizers.

In previous incidents, conference organizers claimed that a Beijing‑based company handled peer review, but the review records provided were clearly forged. ACM suspects that “paper mills” exploited loopholes to get these papers published.

Reference: Retraction Watch article