Massive academic conferences are falling victim to ¡°unethical¡± groups of peer reviewers who are secretly sharing the titles of publications to ensure preferred researchers are invited to these events, a leading computer scientist has claimed.

Warning about the dangers?that ¡°collusion rings¡± pose to the integrity of scholarly meetings, Michael Littman, Royce family professor of teaching excellence in computer science at Brown University, said he was keen to raise awareness of the ¡°growing problem¡± blighting conferences in his discipline, which had seen senior researchers team up to manipulate the ¡°blind¡± peer-review systems of some conferences.

At some large computer science meetings, committees use as many as 5,000 reviewers to assess which submissions ¨C numbering up to 10,000 ¨C are worthy of presentation, with reviewers placing ¡°bids¡± to review papers within their field of expertise.

While all papers are anonymised to ensure reviewers do not evaluate those on which they have a conflict of interest, Professor Littman told?Times Higher Education?that some scholars were secretly passing the titles of submitted works to each other to make sure they were selected.

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¡°The idea that people are gaming these conferences ¨C using their energy and brilliance to thwart the system ¨C really offends me,¡± he explained.

Since he wrote about the issue in this month¡¯s edition of the??(Association for Computing Machinery) after??that these illicit practices had taken place, Professor Littman said many more scholars had contacted him to explain ¡°what was happening behind the scenes¡±.

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¡°I have become a clearing house for this topic ¨C people are saying they see this behaviour in other parts of computer science,¡± he said.

Similar corruption of peer review organised by US science funding agencies in relation to grants had also been alleged, said Professor Littman. ¡°If collusion rings are happening for funding, that¡¯s something that doesn¡¯t just affect computer science,¡± he said.

However, his discipline was more likely to be targeted by such practices given the high premium that it places on presenting at prestigious conferences, with publication in the relatively slow-moving world of journals seen as much less important for career advancement, he said.

¡°By the time someone has published a paper, everyone will have already heard about it because they will have presented it at a conference,¡± said Professor Littman, who added that ¡°decisions on promotions and tenure are often made on whether someone has presented at a very good conference¡±.

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With success rates often lower than 20 per cent, this helped to uphold the standard of research presented at conferences, but collusion rings meant low-quality work was more likely to be accepted, said Professor Littman, who would like to see conference suspensions for those caught collaborating in this way.

¡°People shouldn¡¯t be fired ¨C we perhaps need to treat them as those caught cheating in class,¡± he said.

The increasing popularity of subjects such as machine learning and artificial intelligence was also challenging for conference organisers, he added.

¡°That large scale brings benefits as a lot of people are trying out new ideas which can be shared quickly, but the disadvantage is that you lose that sense of belonging to a community and the feeling that it¡¯s not in your interest to screw someone over to get ahead,¡± said Professor Littman.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com