Clarivate has lifted its hold on Heliyon after the journal’s internal audit led to over 1,000 retractions, expressions of concern and corrections. As a result, the journal will receive an impact factor in the coming cycle, a Clarivate spokesperson said.
Clarivate decided in September 2024 new content from Heliyon would not be indexed in its Web of Science due to concerns about quality. The journal told us at the time it was “investigating,” and since then, it has retracted over 650 articles.
Clarivate lifted the hold on May 14, and Heliyon released a statement shortly after, noting all content published while the journal was on hold will now be indexed. The statement says the audit “revealed behaviors that did not align with our policies.” As we wrote in February, the journal has previously said the concerning practices included compromised peer review, authorship irregularities, tortured phrases and citation manipulation.
Rebecca Krahenbuhl, communications manager at Clarivate, told us since all Heliyon’s missing content was backfilled by the August 1 cutoff, it will receive a new impact factor and updated metrics in the October Journal Citation Reports update.
Being indexed in major databases is seen as a marker of credibility for journals, and some universities and governments create lists of approved journals based on indexes. Authors are less likely to submit to delisted journals, given universities rely on such metrics to judge researchers’ work for promotion and tenure decisions.
The journal issued roughly 1,100 “corrections to the record” which include article corrections, expressions of concern and retractions, which the statement said “affect approximately 3% of content published in Heliyon across 12 years of publication.”
Queen Muse, head of media and communications at Cell Press, told us the 1,197 updates to the scientific record consisted of 687 retractions, 80 expressions of concern, two withdrawals, three removals, 317 corrigenda and 108 editor’s notes.
Heliyon “considers research from all areas of the physical, applied, life, social and medical sciences,” according to its website. The journal published over 11,000 and 17,000 articles in 2023 and 2024, respectively. That number dropped to around 3,000 articles last year. So far in 2026, the journal has published over 500 research papers and case reports.
Amy Bourke-Waite, senior director of communications at Clarivate, told us the company would not comment on specific journals, but referred us to an April blog post by Nandita Quaderi, editor-in-chief of Web of Science. In it, Quaderi noted Clarivate expects publishers to “proactively correct the scholarly record when unreliable content is identified, and to continue these efforts even after a hold is removed.”
Moving forward, Heliyon will “continue to make improvements to the journal’s workflow, including the use of our Check Integrity screening tool with human oversight to help prevent ethical issues in submitted papers, and throughout the publication process,” the May statement reads. “The outcomes of the investigation reflect a systematic effort to correct the scientific record and reinforce trust in the journal’s content.”
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