Ethics and Plagiarism Update

Aggregate Data on Publication Policy Complaints and Disposition

As the world’s leading computing society, preserving the integrity of the scientific process is very much at the core of ACM’s mission. So much so that over the years ACM introduced, maintains, and periodically updates the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. First introduced in 1966, the ACM Code of Ethics has become the global standard for evaluating ethical and professional conduct for the Computing community.

As one of the world’s most respected scholarly publishers, ACM has established publications policies that reflect best professional practice for scholarly publication, consistent with both the ACM Code of Ethics and the International Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). ACM's Publications Policies are regularly reviewed and updated by the ACM Publications Board in consultation with the ACM Ethics & Plagiarism Committee (E&P), and the Office of Publications at ACM Headquarters.

The ACM Publications Board has responsibility for investigating and adjudicating allegations of publications-related violations involving all ACM Publications. The Board’s Ethics and Plagiarism Committee, comprised of members of the computer science community, manages the investigations and either makes decisions on behalf of the ACM Publications Board or makes formal recommendations to the Publications Board, depending on the severity of the allegations. All Level 4 and 5 violations are referred to the full ACM Publications Board for adjudication. (See ACM's policy on Penalties for Publication Violations for more information.)

Over the past decade, ACM has seen a significant increase in the number of claims of publications-related misconduct and as a result more recently established the Ethics and Plagiarism Committee of the ACM Publications Board to investigate and adjudicate such claims. Subsequently, the E&P Committee has become one of the most active of the Publications Board committees and ACM has invested heavily in related tools and services to facilitate investigations and administer penalties related to cases of proven misconduct. Since 2017, we have seen a steady rise in the number of claims ACM receives in connection with various types of Ethics, Plagiarism, and Publications Policy related misconduct.

The following tables provide data related to the number and types of cases ACM has investigated since 2017, including many cases that remain active today.

Table 1. Report of Complaints for Violations of ACM's Publication Ethics and Plagiarism Policies.

Fiscal Year New Complaints Complaints Dismissed1 Complaints Investigated
Unresolved Complaints2 Resolved Complaints3 Resolved Supported4 Resolved Unsupported5 Avg Months to Resolution6
2024 63 9 39 15 6 9 4.6
2023 36 10 11 15 8 7 10.8
2022 58 17 1 40 23 17 10.7
2021 25 8 1 16 8 8 7.1
2020 43 19 0 24 16 8 4.8
2019 38 12 0 26 22 4 4.7
2018 13 8 1 4 4 0 2.3
2017 15 3 0 12 7 5 6.8
Totals 291 86 53 152 94 58 7.2

1 Dismissed means claim is out for scope or insufficient evidence was provided by the claimant to conduct an investigation.
2 Refers to cases for which a decision has not yet been made or an appeal is pending resolution.
3 Refers to cases submitted in that fiscal year in which a decision has been made and any resulting appeals have been resolved. Every row in the table reports on the complaints received in the specified fiscal year and the decisions made for them at some point in the future, in the same or subsequent years.
4 Refers to cases where a decision was made, any resulting appeal was resolved, and a violation was found to have occurred.
5 Refers to cases where a decision was made, any resulting appeal was resolved, and no violation was found to have occurred.
6 Does not include dismissed cases. A number of complaints submitted in FY23 and FY24 are under appeal or have not yet been resolved. The averages for those years will likely increase once those cases reach completion.

Table 2. FY24 New Ethics and Plagiarism Claim Numbers by Publication Types

Publication Type Claims
ACM Journals / Magazines 17
ACM Proceedings / Conference Publications 42
Non-ACM Publications * 4

* ACM regularly receives claims of potential misconduct in connection with non-ACM activities, although ACM Policy prevents ACM from investigating such claims.

Table 3. FY24 New Ethics and Plagiarism Claim Numbers by Type of Violation

Type of Violation Claims
Authorship Violations, including plagiarism 48
Conflict of Interest 3
Coercion, Abuse, Harassment, Retaliation 1
Falsification of Research and Research Misconduct 4
Peer Review Violations 7

Examples of E&P Violations and Resulting Sanctions (Short Abstract Narratives)

The following table provides some high-level examples of cases where evidence was found that supported concluding that the respondent had contravened one or more of ACM’s publications policies.

Table 4. Publication Policy Violation Exemplars. 

Cases of Publication Policy Violations Sanctions/Remediation
The Respondent was found, across numerous peer reviews for multiple ACM publications, to have regularly included a list of Respondent’s published papers that the Respondent suggested the authors add to their reference list, without explaining their relevance to the work in question or identifying them as the Respondent’s own papers. The Respondent did not provide any substantive advice on improving the papers under review. The Respondent was barred from contributing to any ACM venue for five years.
The primary Respondent violated a conference's double-anonymous peer review policy by signing their reviews. In addition, the conference PC chairs failed to enforce the stated double-anonymous policy, sending the signed review to the authors. The Respondent and PC chairs were given warnings (Level I penalties) that double-anonymous policies do not allow reviewers to waive their anonymity. In addition, the chairs were reminded of their obligation to enforce such policies.
A conference paper submission was flagged for citation falsification. The paper was co-authored by several undergraduate students and a professor. The students admitted to using generative tools to create a citation list and failing to confirm the validity of the results. The professor admitted to failing to oversee the work. The submission was deskrejected by the conference. In addition, the professor was barred from contributing to any ACM venue for one year.
A graduate student had reviewed a conference paper and conducted a set of experiments that used similar techniques as the unpublished work. The student did not inform their co-authors of the source for the project's ideas. The work was published without referring to the earlier work, which had also been published. The primary Respondent was barred from contributing to any ACM venue for two years. The co-authors were not penalized beyond the retraction of the work.
The organizers of multiple conferences were found to have manipulated the reference lists of papers by adding citations to their own work. These references were added without the knowledge or awareness of at least some of the papers' original authors. Several collaborators also engaged in citation padding by adding a very significant number of irrelevant and unnecessary self-citations. The full scope of these violations impacted over 100 papers across multiple years of conferences by this organization. The primary Respondent was barred from contributing to any ACM venue for 25 years, while another was barred for 10 years. Other Respondents had work retracted and were barred for one or two years depending on the extent of their violations.

If you think that a violation of ACM publications policy has taken place, including plagiarism of a published ACM work, please visit the ACM Violations Webpage, and complete the Online Web Form to report the potential violation. If you have questions after you have taken these initial steps, please contact ACM’s Director of Publications.