Research Integrity & Malpractice Policy

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

In brief. Submissions are checked for integrity at every stage, from submission through to publication and beyond. Where malpractice is found, the paper is dropped from the review process, the programme and the proceedings; the authors forfeit all fees and are not eligible for any refund, certificate, award, indexing or reinstatement. The Technical Programme Committee may request supporting material at any time and allows four (4) days for a response. The decision of the Committee is final.

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, after presentation, and after the work has appeared in the proceedings. Action 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.

No claim of any kind will lie against the conference in respect of a paper dropped under this policy — including refund of registration or publication fees, certificates of participation or presentation, awards or recognitions, indexing, or reinstatement of the submission.

2. 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 the prior-publication history of the work;
Any other material necessary to verify the integrity of the submission.

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.

3. 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, inconsistent, evasive or unverifiable, or that supplies materials at odds with the submitted paper, is treated as a failure to respond.

4. Indicators of malpractice

Signs of malpractice or unethical practice include, but are not limited to, the following. The TPC may act on conduct of a comparable nature that is not listed here.

4.1 Authorship

Proxy authorship — the listed authors did not perform the work.
Gift, guest or honorary authorship — names added without substantive contribution.
Ghost authorship — omission of persons who did contribute.
Authorship fraud — adding a co-author without that person's knowledge or consent; forged or assumed consent; undisclosed changes to the author list or author order after submission.
Purchase or sale of authorship positions, and manuscripts obtained from paper mills or third-party brokers.
Fabricated or non-existent co-authors, ORCID identifiers or institutional identities.
False, lapsed or borrowed institutional affiliation; impersonation of another researcher.
Contact addresses inconsistent with the claimed affiliation, or controlled by a third party.

4.2 Citation and referencing

Citation padding — references that do not support the claims they are attached to, and references added to inflate counts.
Coercive citation, citation cartels and reciprocal-citation arrangements.
Excessive or irrelevant self-citation.
Gratuitous citation of a venue's own publications in order to influence its metrics, and manipulation of any bibliometric or evaluation measure.
Fabricated, non-existent or hallucinated references.
Citation of retracted work without acknowledgement of its status.
References listed but demonstrably not consulted.

4.3 Presentation and participation

Proxy presentation — the work presented by a person who is not a declared author, or through a substitute, agency or paid presenter.
Registration or payment secured without any presentation being delivered, and registering a paper with no genuine intention that a declared author will present it.
Substitution of the presenter without prior approval.
Pre-recorded material submitted as a live presentation where that is not permitted.
Presentation by an author with no demonstrable involvement in the work.
No-show: a registered paper that is not presented, which is excluded from IEEE Xplore under IEEE's no-show policy.

4.4 Originality and prior publication

Plagiarism, whether verbatim, mosaic or at the level of paraphrase, including reuse of figures, tables or code without attribution and permission.
Text recycling or self-plagiarism beyond disclosed and permitted limits.
Duplicate, redundant or overlapping publication, and concurrent submission to another venue.
Salami slicing — division of a single study into minimally publishable fragments.
Translation of existing work presented as original.
Undisclosed substantial overlap with a preprint, thesis or technical report.
Use of paraphrasing or text-spinning tools to evade similarity detection.
Manipulation of the manuscript file to defeat similarity screening — hidden characters, invisible text, homoglyph substitution, or text rendered as images.
Failing the similarity thresholds applied to every camera-ready paper: up to 15% overall, and up to 2% from any single source, excluding references.

4.5 Data, results and reporting

Fabrication of data, results or experimental conditions.
Falsification — selective omission, alteration or misrepresentation of results.
Image manipulation, including duplication, splicing, cloning or undisclosed adjustment.
Reuse of figures or images across submissions without attribution.
Reported metrics that are internally inconsistent, arithmetically impossible, or unsupported by the stated method.
Results irreconcilable with the reported sample size, protocol or resources.
Selective outcome reporting, p-hacking, or hypothesising after results are known.
Failure or refusal to supply raw data, code or logs when requested.
Code or data availability links that are dead, restricted, or do not contain the stated artefacts.
Results that cannot be reproduced from the materials supplied by the authors.

4.6 Peer review integrity

Peer review manipulation — suggesting reviewers whose identities or contact addresses are controlled by the authors.
Impersonation of a reviewer, editor, chair, committee member or organiser.
Collusion rings among authors, reviewers or programme committee members.
Attempts to identify, contact, pressure or influence reviewers.
Deliberate breach of anonymity in a double-blind process.
Offers of payment, inducement or favour to editors, reviewers or organisers.
Manipulation of bidding or assignment in the review system.

4.7 Use of generative AI

Undisclosed generative AI use for substantive content where disclosure is required by IEEE.
Listing an AI system as an author, or attributing to it the responsibilities of an author.
AI-generated citations, data or results presented as genuine.
Unedited model artefacts left in the manuscript — placeholder text, prompt residue, assistant-voice phrasing, or the machine-paraphrased “tortured phrases” characteristic of automated rewriting.
Text embedded in the submission intended to influence AI-assisted reviewers.
Submitting AI output without the human verification that makes the authors answerable for every claim in the paper.

4.8 Disclosure and compliance

Undisclosed conflicts of interest, funding sources, sponsorships or competing interests.
Absent, expired or falsified ethics approval for research involving human participants, human data or animals.
Missing informed consent, or use of identifiable data without authorisation.
Use of datasets in breach of licence, terms of use or applicable privacy law.
Non-compliance with export-control, dual-use or national-security obligations, and research whose foreseeable use is harmful.
Misrepresentation of the work's review, indexing or publication status elsewhere.
Misuse of IEEE or ICCCMLA names, logos or branding.

4.9 Conduct

Falsification of correspondence with editors, reviewers or the committee.
Providing false or misleading information to the TPC, or obstructing an enquiry under this policy.
Evasive, contradictory or absent responses to integrity queries.
Withdrawal after acceptance in order to publish the same work elsewhere.
A recurring pattern of any of the above across submissions by the same authors.

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;
Barring the authors from future submissions to this conference series for a period determined by the TPC.

The authors will not be eligible for any claims. Fees already paid stand forfeited: they are non-refundable and are not transferable to another submission, another author or a future edition of the conference. No compensation, substitution or credit will be offered.

6. Decisions are final

The decision of the Technical Programme Committee is final and binding. No appeal, representation 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. Version in force

This policy was last revised on 9 September 2026. The version in force for any submission is the version published on this page at the time that submission was made.

9. Related pages

Author Instructions · Call for Papers · Registration · Terms