Bioengineered retracted 119 papers in October amid investigations into suspected paper mill activity and other integrity-related concerns at the Taylor & Francis journal.
Clarivate delisted Bioengineered from its Web of Science platform in May 2025, after placing it on hold a year earlier. In July 2025, the publisher suspended new submissions to the journal, which publishes bioengineering and biotechnology research, to focus on the investigations.
Concerns about paper mill activity date back to 2021, when the journal began investigating a spike in submissions and requests to change authorship after submission.
In the 2025 announcement, the publisher said it put an “under investigation” notice on over 1,000 articles.
The move followed an analysis led by René Aquarius, biomedical scientist and science sleuth at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who reported hundreds of articles in the journal with potentially problematic images that had gone unnoticed. Their analysis, ultimately published in Bioengineered, suggested that while the publisher may have curbed new submissions from paper mills, there was still a backlog of potentially compromised articles.
Aquarius and colleagues concluded the publisher should use their findings as a starting point for systematically identifying all compromised articles.
The journal has now retracted 255 papers since the investigation began in 2021. The most recent batch of 119 were published Oct. 1-2.
“I think all of those retractions stem from the 1000+ article investigation that they announced in their editorial. Some of them were flagged by us, but not all,” Aquarius told Retraction Watch by email.
A handful of the notices list a specific concern, such as image duplication from an unrelated article, authorship changes, or peer review irregularities. But most of the notices don’t give a specific reason, stating “significant concerns have been raised” — or “raised by a third party” — “about the integrity of the data and reported results in the article.”
In response to questions about the latest retractions or the journal’s future, both a Taylor & Francis spokesperson and Jelena Vider, the editor-in-chief of Bioengineered, referred us to the publisher’s July 2025 announcement about the investigation.
It’s not clear whether the publisher’s investigation has identified additional problematic papers, or if the notices relate to articles examined by Aquarius’ team.
“Given the amount of papers under investigation and the big publication peak that happened in 2021 and 2022, my guess is that more retractions will probably follow in the future,” Aquarius said.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].