Heliyon has published fewer papers and ramped up its retractions since a major indexing service put the journal on hold and the publisher launched an audit of all papers published in the journal since its launch in 2016.
Clarivate put Heliyon on hold in September 2024, citing concerns about the quality of the content. The “on-hold” status indicates a journal is being re-evaluated, and new content isn’t indexed, according to documentation on the Clarivate website. If Clarivate removes the hold by August 1, the journal will receive an impact factor this year. If not, its impact factor will be listed as “forthcoming,” a spokesperson for Clarivate told us.
Heliyon published over 11,000 papers in 2023 and more than 17,000 in 2024, issuing around two dozen retractions in each year. Last year, the journal published 3,168 articles and retracted 392 others.
So far this year, 37 papers have been retracted, and 144 have been published. The retraction notices cite reference issues, citation stacking, suspicious affiliations and areas of research, authorship changes, ethical approval, among others.
The journal’s editorial director, Christopher Schulz, declined to comment about whether the uptick in retractions was a result of the journal being put on hold, as did the journal’s publishers, Cell Press and Elsevier.
Queen Muse, the head of media and communications at Cell Press, pointed us to a statement the journal published last April. The statement says Elsevier performed an audit of the journal that “uncovered concerns regarding practices that do not align with our policies, such as citation manipulation, compromised peer review, authorship irregularities, and tortured phrases.”
As a result, Elsevier started an investigation involving “all published articles between the launch of the journal and the present day for integrity and ethics concerns,” the statement says. It also states the investigation is ongoing, and also includes “making improvements to the journal’s workflow to help prevent ethical issues in new submitted papers.”
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