Research Integrity & Malpractice Policy

Revision date: 9 September 2026 · Applies to all submissions to ICCCMLA 2026

ICCCMLA 2026 is an IEEE conference (Conference Record No. 71579) and holds every submission to the standards of the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board Operations Manual. This policy sets out what the Technical Programme Committee (TPC) treats as malpractice, the evidence it may require, and the consequences.

1. The core clause

At any stage from submission to publication, if signs of malpractice or unethical practice are found, the paper will be dropped and the authors will not be eligible for any claims.

“Any stage” means exactly that: before review, during review, after acceptance, after registration and payment, after the camera-ready copy has been submitted, after the programme is published, during the conference, and after publication. Action taken late does not become unavailable because an earlier stage has passed.

“Signs” means credible indications. The TPC does not need to have completed a formal finding of misconduct, nor to have proved intent, before acting under this policy.

2. What counts as malpractice

The following are signs of malpractice or unethical practice. This list includes but is not limited to the items below, and the TPC may act on conduct of a comparable nature that is not listed here.

Authorship

Proxy authorship — ghost, guest, gift or honorary authorship; listing any person who did not make a substantive contribution; omitting any person who did.
Authorship fraud — adding, removing or reordering authors without the documented consent of all authors; forged or assumed consent; submitting on behalf of a person who has not agreed to be an author.
Buying, selling or otherwise trading authorship positions, and any dealing with paper mills or third-party manuscript brokers.
False, inflated or non-existent affiliations, credentials, titles or institutional email addresses; impersonation of another researcher.

Originality and the manuscript

Plagiarism in any form — verbatim copying, mosaic or patchwork paraphrase, translated plagiarism, and reuse of figures, tables, code or text without attribution and permission.
Self-plagiarism and text recycling beyond what is properly disclosed and cited.
Duplicate, redundant or concurrent submission — the same or substantially overlapping work submitted to another venue while under consideration here, or already published elsewhere.
Salami slicing — fragmenting one study into multiple minimal submissions.
Failing the similarity thresholds applied to every camera-ready paper: up to 15% overall, and up to 2% from any single source, excluding references.

Data and results

Data fabrication — reporting data, results, participants or experiments that do not exist.
Data falsification — manipulating data, images, figures or instrument output; inappropriate splicing or enhancement of images; removing inconvenient observations.
Selective or misleading reporting, undisclosed post-hoc analysis, misrepresented statistics, and results that cannot be reproduced from the materials supplied.
Misattributed, misquoted or invented sources, including references that do not exist or do not say what is claimed.

Citation conduct

Citation padding — gratuitous self-citation, references added to inflate counts, references not consulted, and references with no bearing on the work.
Coercive citation and participation in citation cartels or reciprocal-citation arrangements.
Manipulation of any bibliometric or evaluation metric.

Peer review and the programme

Peer review manipulation — suggesting fabricated or controlled reviewer identities, supplying reviewer contact addresses under the author's control, colluding with reviewers, attempting to identify, contact, pressure or induce reviewers or committee members, or interfering with the assignment of reviews.
Impersonating a reviewer, chair, committee member or organiser.
Proxy presentation — presentation by any person who is not a declared author of the paper; presentation arranged through a substitute, agency or paid presenter; registering a paper with no genuine intention that a declared author will present it.
No-show: a registered paper that is not presented, which is excluded from IEEE Xplore under IEEE's no-show policy.

Generative AI

Undisclosed generative AI use — AI-generated or AI-assisted text, code, data, figures or analysis that is not disclosed in the manuscript in the manner IEEE requires.
Listing an AI system as an author, or attributing to it the responsibilities of an author.
AI-generated content presented as original research, including hallucinated references, fabricated results and the machine-paraphrased “tortured phrases” characteristic of automated rewriting.
Submitting AI output without the human verification that makes the authors answerable for every claim in the paper.

Disclosure and compliance

Undeclared conflicts of interest, funding sources, sponsorships or competing interests.
Missing or invalid ethics approval for research involving human participants, human data or animals; absent or inadequate informed consent.
Breach of data-protection obligations, confidentiality, licence terms or third-party rights, including the use of proprietary or personal data without authority.
Non-compliance with export-control, dual-use or national-security obligations, and research whose foreseeable use is harmful.
Misuse of IEEE or ICCCMLA names, logos or branding, and misrepresentation of a paper's status, indexing or acceptance.
Providing false or misleading information to the TPC, withholding requested evidence, or obstructing an enquiry under this policy.

3. Evidence the TPC may demand

At any stage, and without being required to give reasons in advance, the TPC may require the authors to produce any of the following:

Raw and primary data underlying the results, in a usable form;
Analysis code, scripts, models, configurations and random seeds sufficient to reproduce the reported results;
Experiment logs, laboratory notebooks, instrument output, timestamps and version history;
Ethics approvals, review-board references, informed-consent documents and data-use agreements;
Institutional confirmation of authorship, affiliation and the contribution of each named author, issued by the institution rather than by the authors;
Written confirmation from every co-author that they consent to authorship and to the submitted version;
Similarity reports, generative-AI disclosures and prior-publication history of the work.

Requests are sent to the corresponding author at the email address registered with the submission. It is the corresponding author's responsibility to keep that address monitored and to reach their co-authors.

4. Four days to respond

Authors have four (4) days from the date a request is sent in which to respond in full.

Failure to respond within four days is itself grounds for action under this policy, independently of the concern that prompted the request. A response that is incomplete, evasive, unverifiable, or that supplies materials inconsistent with the submitted paper, is treated as a failure to respond.

5. Consequences

Where signs of malpractice are found, the paper is dropped. Depending on the stage reached, that means one or more of:

Rejection without review, or withdrawal from the review process;
Withdrawal of acceptance, and removal from the programme;
Exclusion from the proceedings and non-submission to IEEE Xplore;
Where the paper has already been published, a request to the publisher for retraction, with a retraction notice stating the reason;
Notification of the authors' institutions, funders and co-authors, and of IEEE, where the TPC considers it warranted;
Refusal of future submissions from the authors to this conference series.

The authors will not be eligible for any claims. Registration fees and any other amounts paid are non-refundable and non-transferable in these circumstances, and no compensation, substitution, credit or transfer to another edition will be offered.

6. Decisions are final

The decision of the Technical Programme Committee is final and binding. No representation, appeal or further correspondence in respect of that decision will be entertained.

This does not limit any separate obligation on the part of IEEE or the authors' institutions to conduct their own enquiries.

7. Raising a concern

Concerns about the integrity of a submission or a presentation may be raised in confidence with the organisers at convenericccmla@gmail.com. Please include the paper identifier and the basis for the concern. Concerns may also be reported through the IEEE Ethics Reporting Line.

8. Related pages

Author Instructions · Call for Papers · Registration · Terms