The growing publication rate puts an increasing pressure on peer review. Low-quality articles get accepted despite flaws and scientific misconduct. We focus on the case of tortured articles: publications containing paraphrased scientific expressions that we call tortured phrases. These tortured phrases typically result from authors violating scientific norms, who copy-paraphrase-paste preexisting text: it is a form of synonym-based plagiarism. In this study, we show that such tortured conference articles tend to cluster within certain recurring conference series. We analyze the organization and characteristics of these conferences to better understand the mechanisms behind their emergence and proliferation.
Swart et al. (Mon,) studied this question.