(In case this isn’t clear, the first part of this post is written in bitter irony. The second part might actually be useful to Conference Chairs)
So, you want to have your name on a paper that’s published in a top-tier Computer Science conference? You have two options: One is to work hard on some worthwhile research, submit it to a conference, and eventually perhaps get it accepted. This post focuses on the other possibility: Simply cheat!
The most important thing to know about Computer Science conferences are that the people running them assume good intentions. If yours are not, it is easy to take advantage of this basic assumption.
Here are several tried and tested methods (each with an easy name for you to remember them by):
- The cuckoo method: Put your name on another person’s paper. Specifically, ask a colleague to put your name on their paper. No one checks if your name should be there, and even if they did, it’s impossible to verify that your name ought to be on the paper. Bonus: If you have your own paper, offer your colleague reciprocity!
- Idea laundering: Plagiarizing is bad, but copying with minor changes is bad and difficult to detect. This works better in lower-tier conferences and with older papers. Here’s how you do it: Find someone’s obscure paper and submit it as your own after making minor changes to the title, text and perhaps the equations and figures. This also works well for your own previously accepted papers.
- Parallel parking: Most conferences don’t allow the submission of papers to multiple conferences in parallel. Anyone who’s worked on parallel processing knows this is sub-optimal, if you are optimizing to get your paper published. Therefore, submit your paper in parallel to a few conferences. There’s a lot of randomness in acceptance, so one of the conferences may take your work. The likelihood that Chairs of one conference will compare notes with other Chairs is very small, so your risk is miniscule. On the safe side, it is recommended to change the text slightly whenever you resubmit the paper.
- 50 shades of same: Generative AI models are great at rephrasing. Use them to create several versions of your paper and submit them all to a conference of your choice. Conferences are a raffle, and you’re just buying several tickets to it.
- Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours: Many conferences require you to label people with whom you have a conflict of interest and therefore won’t review your paper. Some do this automatically. One way to get around this is to make sure to mark everyone as a conflict of interest, except three or four colleagues whom you told about your paper and know that they should expect to review it. The assignment system will have no choice but to assign your paper to your friends, and they’ll write glowing reviews to your paper. Alternatively, if you have to bid for papers, bid for your friends’ papers and have them bid on yours. If you have more than one friend (not obvious in CS), it’s not too difficult to arrange a ring of reviews: You bid on friend A’s paper. Friend A bids on Friend B’s papers, and Friend B bids on yours. That way, it’s much harder to uncover.
- You do you: Like the previous, why not create your own fake profile on the conference reviewing platform and volunteer to review? If you work your conflict of interests well, you’ll be chosen to review your own work which is, completely objectively, amazing, isn’t it?
- Bait and switch: Most conferences allow minor changes to be made to papers after they are accepted and before they are published in the proceedings. Take your accepted paper, switch it with another paper of the same title (or remove most of the contents from your accepted paper to save it for the next conference) and submit that as the paper for the proceedings.
What to do if you are caught: First, relax. The chances of you getting caught are miniscule. Most Conference Chairs assume fair play and aren’t interested in catching bad behavior.
On the off-chance that a reviewer finds that you plagiarized, or that some PC Chair goes out of their way and detects your shenanigans, your first response is not to respond. Ignore any emails for a while. The additional work may cause the Chairs to go away.
If they persist, accuse them of being bad at their job. Attack is the best defense.
In the worst case, lay the blame on the most junior person on the author list (Bonus: Have said junior author admit guilt in writing to the Chairs). This is because the Chairs are less likely to want to pursue ethics charges with a junior colleague so as not to ruin their career. Important note: Make sure you are not the junior author!
Most often your paper will be rejected from that conference (but if you’ve been following the above, you’ll have submitted it to plenty of other conferences, so it is not really an issue). There will be no record of your transgressions. Only very rarely will the Chairs pursue steps with their organization’s ethics committee. If that happens, repeat the above process.
On a more serious note
All the above examples are things that either I saw or heard first-person accounts from those who saw it themselves. The main problems are, in my opinion, that we don’t give academic dishonesty enough attention. Granted, over 90% of authors are honest, but if we don’t take care of the offenders, the problem will only grow as it is essentially a free rider problem). Therefore, if you’re a Chair of a conference, I recommend:
- Be very explicit in your Call for Papers. State what’s not allowed even if it seems obvious to you.
- If your organization supports it, check to see if authors are listed as ones who are barred from submitting because of past transgressions.
- Do not allow any change in authorship (including ordering of authors) after submission. If the authors “forgot” someone, suggest they withdraw the paper and resubmit it to another venue in future.
- Work with the Chairs of other conferences in adjacent areas that are running within the same 6-month period (before or after your conference). Compare the papers submitted to your conference with the ones submitted to theirs. It is enough to measure the Jaccard distance of titles, authors and abstracts to catch many offenders.
- Make sure that you set the review system such that it doesn’t allow people to match to a small number of papers.
- Compare reviewed papers to camera-ready papers and reject those who made significant changes.
- Consider having an Ethics Chair to take care of these issues, as their volume may overwhelm the PC Chairs.
- Make sure to submit complaints to the relevant bodies, such as the ACM Ethics & Plagiarism Committee (https://www.acm.org/publications/publications-board-committees), the IEEE Plagiarism Information Center for IEEE Publication Volunteers (https://www.ieee.org/publications/pet) and the AAAI Executive Council (https://aaai.org/about-aaai/ethics-and-plurality/). It’s a lengthy process, but one that critical to go through.
Any other methods that I missed? Do you have ideas to combat these issues? Please do comment!