Elsevier’s International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has issued more than 100 retractions and counting for manipulated peer review in guest-edited special issues. The publisher has said one more retraction is coming.
Since June the publisher has retracted 120 papers. According to the retraction notices, the journal identified “[s]ystematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process.”
A spokesperson for Elsevier told Retraction Watch the publisher “became aware of possible systematic manipulation and other issues such as plagiarism, image duplication, and authorship issues in a number of articles published in Special Issues” in 2025, which led them to conduct a wider investigation into more recent special issues.
Nearly all of the retracted papers had authors with affiliations in China and were published in 2024 and 2025. The articles covered cancer cell mutations and molecular causes of chronic conditions like sleep apnea and pain, among other topics.
Guest-edited special issues appear to be particularly vulnerable to manipulation. Amid its retraction of more than 10,000 papers between late 2022 and early 2024, Hindawi temporarily suspended publishing special issues in 2023 because of manipulated peer review. In 2024, a Springer Nature journal retracted 34 papers from special issues for “compromised editorial handling and peer review process.” The same year, Annals of Operations Research retracted an entire special issue over concerns about “compromised” peer review.
The author who lost the most papers (five) in the latest spate of retractions was Junkai Qin, who listed affiliations with Minzu Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Affiliated Hospital of Youjiang Medical University for Nationalities. The five retracted articles from the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules are the only ones listed on Qin’s ResearchGate profile. We could not find a corresponding ORCID or institutional profile page for the researcher, and none of the corresponding authors of the five papers responded to our emails.
Li Jin, a researcher who listed affiliations at Macau University of Science and Technology and University of Electronic Science and Technology, lost three papers in the bulk retraction. Jin told us he was in the process of contacting the journal “to inquire about the specific details and official rationale for these retractions, including the peer review concerns.”
The Elsevier spokesperson told us the retractions “pertaining to this peer-review manipulation scheme are now almost complete, and Guest Editor checks were further tightened to enable detection of issues as soon as possible.”
Fabian Wittmers, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University, told us he has been sending batches of concerning papers to the journal since April 2025. He has flagged over 300 articles so far, both to the journal and on PubPeer, he told us, and wrote about the journal in a blog post last September. Only one of the papers he reported was among those retracted for peer-review manipulation; 11 of the 352 he has reported have been retracted for other reasons.
The journal roughly doubled its publication volume from nearly 5,000 articles in 2023 to over 9,600 in 2024, and published over 10,300 articles in 2025.
The publisher did not respond to our question regarding this spike, but said: “Given the rise in submissions across the research publishing ecosystem and other changes seen in recent years, the investment made by the academic publishing industry to ensure research integrity is higher than ever.” So far in 2026, the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has published over 4,000 articles.
Assistant database researcher Noah Knox contributed data for this article.
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