Hello fellow journalologists,
At the end of September, 2024, two of the largest and fastest growing journals — Heliyon and Cureus — were put ‘on hold’ by Web of Science.
Yesterday, the fate of Cureus — which published 25,000 articles last year — was quietly announced by Clarivate and the news was not good for the journal’s publisher, Springer Nature. Cureus has been removed from Web of Science, which described it as an “Editorial De-listing”.
Meanwhile, Heliyon, a Cell Press journal published by Elsevier, is still in limbo 13 months after its ‘on hold’ status was made public.
In issue 95 of this newsletter I suggested that the Sword of Damocles was hanging over the head of the two journals, ready to fall depending on Web of Sciences’ final decision.
After all, the graph below shows what happened to article output when MDPI’s International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health lost its impact factor:
However, I was wrong in my assessment. Just the hint of being delisted was enough to decapitate one journal (Heliyon) and severely wound the other (Cureus), with yesterday’s announcement from Web of Science potentially providing a mortal blow to the Springer Nature title.
All the graphs in this article were obtained from Dimensions, a bibliometric tool owned by Digital Science. I set the filters to Article AND (Research Article OR Review). This search strategy strips out preprints and shows us the volume of primary research and review articles.
Heliyon
Let’s start with Heliyon — which is still ‘on hold’, remember, and hasn’t been delisted — and take a look at what happened after the September 2024 announcement.
Heliyon was launched in 2015 as a direct competitor to Scientific Reports. It struggled to gain traction initially, but performed much better when it moved under the Cell Press banner.
The graph below shows the volume of research and review articles published in Heliyon. The dotted line represents article output year-to-date in 2025.
Article volumes rose dramatically in 2023 and 2024. The increase could be due to (1) an improved transfer cascade from Elsevier’s vast journals portfolio or (2) direct submissions. I suspect it was a bit of both.
Regardless, article output in 2025 fell off a cliff. I can’t see how volumes would fall that quickly after Heliyon was put ‘on hold’ by Web of Science unless someone at Elsevier hit the brakes hard. Heliyon is part of the Cell Press family and presumably the publisher would want to protect that brand.
Heliyon’s APC is $2,270 so a decrease of 15,000 articles in 2025 could result in up to a $30m shortfall this year, compared with 2024 (depending on the level of waivers etc.). That’s quite a financial penalty for getting quality control wrong on a journal that’s part of Cell Press, one of Elsevier’s premier brands.
Heliyon’s growth was primarily driven by articles coming from China, although other countries increased too, to a lesser degree, in 2023 and 2024.
The list of new articles published in Heliyon this month “ahead of final publication in an issue” gives an indication of the problems the journal is facing. The (very long) list is made up entirely of Corrigendums, Retraction Notices, Expressions of Concern, Publisher’s Notes, and Corrections. There are well over a hundred of them this year, with a large number being published this month. Elsevier’s Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics team has been very busy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no official communication from Elsevier about what’s going on here. My best guess is that Heliyon is trying to put its house in order to avoid a similar delisting fate to Cureus.
Cureus
Cureus (the full name is Cureus Journal of Medical Science) is a medical journal with an unusual business model that was acquired by Springer Nature in 2022. It was founded by two clinical professors — one from the USA and one from Germany — in 2009. Article output was low for the first five years or so, but then volumes began to increase.
Like Heliyon, Cureus grew very rapidly as it matured, publishing 25,000 research and review articles in 2024, making it the second largest journal in the world — behind Scientific Reports — last year.
Cureus also had a reduced output in 2025 after being put ‘on hold’ by Web of Science in September 2024. However, the drop in article volumes so far this year (dotted lines) is nowhere near as precipitous as Heliyon experienced, as the graph below shows.
The geographical publication profile of Cureus is rather different to Heliyon. Cureus publishes very few papers from China, which is highly unusual for a journal of its size.
The fastest growing country in 2023 and 2024 was India, with the USA also growing quickly in 2023. Both countries had reduced output in 2025 with Japan and the UK appearing to buck the trend this year.
Four spin off journals have been launched with the Cureus brand over the past few years. It’s still early days, but article outputs have been modest with around 300 articles published to date across those titles.
Why was Cureus delisted?
Clarivate has not publicly explained why Cureus has been editorially delisted. Indeed, the only way to learn from Clarivate about Cureus’ new indexing status is to download the monthly update to the Master Journal List, which went live yesterday and is hosted in a password protected area. Four other journals were also marked as “Editorial De-listing” in the latest update. Cureus is the focus of this newsletter because of its sheer scale.
This is what the Web of Science says about its editorial assessment process:
If valid concerns arise regarding an indexed journal – either through internal monitoring by our AI tools or in-house editors, or external feedback from users and/or trusted community sources – the journal will be re-evaluated according to our quality criteria. During this period, new content will not be processed for indexing and an ‘On Hold’ notice will be placed on the Master Journal List for transparency.
If a journal is removed from coverage because it no longer meets the quality criteria, it will be removed from the Master Journal List and appear as an ‘Editorial De-listing’ in the next Monthly Changes file available from the Monthly Changes Archive.
It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that research integrity challenges are the primary reason for Cureus’ removal from Web of Science; Cureus has its own page on Retraction Watch, after all. However, we don’t know the precise reasons why Web of Science made this decision.
It’s worth noting that the Cureus website only has five article types, none of which relate to any form of editorial correction or retraction. PubMed lists nearly 200 retraction notices for Cureus. However, when I copied and pasted the titles of some of those notices into the Cureus search engine, no results were returned. The retracted articles are there, though; clicking on the DOI link in the PubMed record takes you to the right page. But for casual browsers of the Cureus website it’s as if those articles don’t exist; they are hidden from view, at least as far as I could tell. At the very least there should be a page listing retractions, as Nature, for example, does here.
A Clarivate spokesperson told me that details of the editorial review process are confidential. I reached out to Springer Nature for comment yesterday afternoon, and received this today:
The Cureus Journal of Medical Science plays a vital role in sharing freely available independently peer-reviewed research and clinical case reports that can be used by researchers and applied by doctors and clinicians to support better health outcomes. While we are very disappointed by Clarivate’s decision (to de-list Cureus), we always welcome feedback and will review areas to see if we can make further improvements. Our commitment to the Cureus mission of delivering fast, affordable, trusted and quality-assured publishing for the global medical community remains strong. This is backed by Springer Nature’s integrity standards, specialist teams, internal audits and significant investment in dedicated tools to help reviewers, editors and checkers spot problematic content.
In 2022, when Springer Nature acquired Cureus, Professor John Adler, the President and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal, had this to say in the press release:
Our new relationship will further strengthen our efforts to be the fastest, lowest cost, oftentimes free, Open Access medical journal in the world, and also one with the broadest reach. What once seemed elusive due to our outsider status is now within reach: indexing in MEDLINE, receiving an Impact Factor - everything is now on the table!
We will have to wait and see whether being delisted from Web of Science will cause article volumes to fall further at Cureus, and whether other indexers, like MEDLINE, will follow Web of Science’s lead.
According to Retraction Watch, Professor Adler is stepping down as Editor-in-Chief at the end of this year after nearly 16 years in charge. The story links through to a recent update on his LinkedIn page which says:
The journal industry uses an “aura” of intellectual exclusivity to protect its obscene profits. Journals protect their business franchize [sic] through both excessively complex editorial processes (WOS, COPE), which notably lack any evidence of social benefit, and high prices, which in combination disadvantage authors from developing countries. Nothing scares the journal world more than democratizing journals. 😊
Editorial policies, as laid out by COPE, ICMJE etc., are not “excessively complex”. They are the result of decades of combined editorial experience, used to define best practice. New entrants ignore them at their peril.
Conclusions
Clarivate’s Web of Science team wields immense power; it can make or break a journal with its editorial decisions and adversely affect revenue lines to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. To some degree that’s a good thing. We need publishers and editors to be held accountable for what they publish; the indexers are the closest thing we have to an enforcement agency.
However, the lack of transparency troubles me, as does the fact that the enforcers are not themselves accountable to anyone.
When a research article is retracted, the journal is expected to publish a notice explaining why the decision to retract was made. Surely the same rules should apply to indexers for journal delistings.
We’re now in a situation where the second largest academic journal in the world by article volume has lost its impact factor, and we can only speculate as to why.
Furthermore, Heliyon is still in limbo, 13 months after being put ‘on hold’, with no announcement forthcoming from Elsevier about why so many correction and retraction notices are being issued day after day.
There’s a lot of talk in scholarly publishing about the importance of being open and transparent, but actions speak louder than words. As an industry, we have to do better than this.