Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.

Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.

WoS is “making a big call here, taking aim at two of the mega-journals that have grown massively in recent years,” said Nick Wise, a scientific sleuth and a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “WoS appears to be one of the only organisations with the power to compel big publishers to act. I don’t think that’s a sign of a healthy academic publishing system, but it’s how things are currently.”

Mohammed Al-Amr noted the news about Heliyon over the weekend on X.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which in addition to owning Scopus is also the parent company of Cell Press, the publisher of Heliyon, told us it is “investigating” but would not elaborate. According to its website, “Heliyon considers research from all areas of the physical, applied, life, social and medical sciences.”

Graham Parker-Finger, director of publishing and customer success at Cureus, told us:

Obviously, we are disappointed by this news and are waiting for information about why Clarivate has chosen to take this step. We are absolutely committed to the integrity of our journal, investigating all concerns that are raised with us as well as acting proactively, and we expect to be able to resolve this situation in the near future.

We have reported frequently on Cureus in the past. The journal, a Springer Nature title that prides itself on speedy publication, has drawn flak for publishing low-quality studies and hosting “channels” that allow questionable organizations to hand-pick their own editors. Earlier this year, it retracted 55 papers from Saudi Arabia for dubious authorship.

Wise noted: 

It is very interesting that WoS have put Cureus and Heliyon on hold on grounds of quality (if I’m reading the journal master list correctly). The Cureus ‘academic channels’ appear purpose-built to be abused by papermills, whilst no article is out of scope at Heliyon. The journals are set up so that they can never be removed from the list for publishing articles that are out of scope, as others have been previously.

Lonni Besançon, an assistant professor of visualization at Linköping University in Sweden and a scientific sleuth, said he worried the fast peer-review process at Cureus could undermine quality. He highlighted a study of the use of ivermectin to prevent COVID-19 that was later found to be flawed.

“Overall, I’d say that I’m happy that [Cureus and Heliyon] are put on hold and that, perhaps, there is something that is going to be done about potentially problematic journals or groups,” Besançon told us. He added he was “wondering if we could have more transparency on the process and what prompted this move” by WoS.

A pop-up box on Clarivate’s website defining the on-hold status states:

Concerns have been raised about the quality of the content published in this journal. The journal is being re-evaluated according to our selection criteria; new content will not be indexed during the course of the re-evaluation.

Rachel Scheer, director of external communications, academia and government, at Clarivate, told us by email:

When the evaluation is complete, the publisher will be informed of the outcome and the journal will either be removed from coverage if it no longer meets the quality criteria or remain covered if it continues to meet the quality criteria.

The freely accessible Master Journal List is updated monthly and should be considered the authoritative source for Web of Science coverage.   

James Butcher, the author of the newsletter Journalology, wrote in a September 29 LinkedIn post about the new developments:

We should assume innocence until we hear otherwise. We don’t know what aspects of the journals the Web of Science team is investigating.

However, other fast growing journals have fallen foul of Web of Science indexing criteria.

IJERPH (MDPI) was delisted last year [Ed: see more coverage here] for publishing articles that were out of scope and output plummeted as a result.

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18 thoughts on “Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold”

    1. Have you linked the wrong paper? I do not see any discussion of AI generated content at the link you give. (Also, one of the major objections being raised to the paper appears to be based on incorrect statistical reasoning.)

    2. The actual issue is that publishers’ regulation is that if the authors declare using AI for generating the literature, they are basically good to go. This regulation must change. In this particular instance, the article, in the Search Strategy section, declared that the entire meta-analysis done by Rayyan application which is a AI-based meta-analysis tool. The text also AI-generated, please check for instance the Discussion section using the AI detectors, you see that entire text is AI-generated. Just because the authors declared using AI, are they good to go? are the results reliable?

      1. while AI generated text is annoying, it serves as access to non english speakers for their research. Unless you are suggesting that high english skills should be necessary for publication in global journals, I don’t really see a problem if the paper is reviewed and use of AI is acknowledged.

    3. I absolutely agree with the concerns, as I stated in the article, but my remark is that it’s also the case for other journals and publishers. And yet, there is no such move from WoS for them. I’d just like to know more about what prompted this reaction from WoS.

  1. let this be the begging of the end for the *stupid* mega journals

    and please let IEEE Access be the next to die

  2. We identified in our article titled “Heliyon Publishes Ataei et al. (2024) Ignoring Major Theoretical and Methodological Problems: An Instance of Relaxed or Nescient Peer Review” that Heliyon publishes false/erroneous research without applying any standard quality control practice. This article is an undeniable instance of nescience of the reviewers and editors working at Heliyon. Please find our full analysis here: https://scholarlycritic.com/heliyon-ataei-etal-2024-instance-of-relaxed-nescient-peer-review.html

  3. Manuscripts that are rejected by journals due to lack of quality or before initial evaluation are directed to a new-established journal with a strange name of Heliyon with no specific scope and subject.
    In this way, the publisher does not allow a few thousand dollars of processing fee for each submitted manuscript go to the pocket of their competitor publishers.
    It happened to our manuscript, which the journal suggested us to transfer it to Heliyon before any assessment and even looking at it.

  4. Quality of research papers must be any how maintained. Therefore, poor quality journals should not be indexed in Scopus or WoS database. Editors and the reviewers both hold prime responsibility to accept or reject the manuscript based on quality contents.

  5. This will be a great concern and problem to student researchers all over the world. Those journals already marked as “on hold” in WoS last year is still on hold. It would be better if a timeline is set.

  6. So a private company aligned with certain publishing houses just self-appoints itself to oversee all journals? Sounds like a bigger problem than a few bad journals.

  7. James Butcher posted a very interesting analysis of the growth of these two journals., which were the fastest growing journals in the world in 2023.
    For years Heliyon was the mega journal that wasn’t, trailing far behind Scientific Reports, PLOS, and Science Advances. Then in 2022 it took off with growth led from Chinese authors. In Cureus, the largest author contribution is from India followed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and China’s not even in the top 6. Another weird thing about Cureus was that Rare Diseases were the largest article category, wherein other OA general biomedical journals, articles about rare diseases are relatively rare.
    Strange stuff.

    https://www.dimensions.ai/blog/a-view-on-two-rapidly-growing-journals/

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