Heliyon to regain impact factor in October after two-year Web of Science hold and mass self-correction
Clarivate confirms Heliyon will regain its Web of Science impact factor in October, two years after a quality hold and a mass self-correction of 1,197 items.
Clarivate placed Heliyon (Cell Press/Elsevier) on hold in its Web of Science Core Collection in September 2024 over quality concerns, meaning new content went unindexed. Following an internal audit, the journal issued roughly 1,197 corrections to the scientific record: 687 retractions, 80 expressions of concern, two withdrawals, three removals, 317 corrigenda and 108 editor's notes, affecting an estimated 3% of everything the journal has published across 12 years. Clarivate lifted the hold in May 2026. Retraction Watch reported on 7 August 2026, citing a Clarivate spokesperson, that all of Heliyon's backlog content was backfilled into the index by an 1 August 2026 cutoff, and that the journal will receive a new impact factor and updated metrics in the October 2026 Journal Citation Reports update. Cell Press's own communications team confirmed the exact correction tally to Retraction Watch on the record.
Heliyon has said the audit "revealed behaviors that did not align with our policies," previously citing compromised peer review, authorship irregularities, "tortured phrases" (a marker of machine-paraphrased plagiarism), and citation manipulation as the underlying problems. The journal says it will continue using Clarivate's Check Integrity screening tool going forward.
Analysis: This is a useful counter-example to the more common mega-journal story, which usually ends in quiet delisting rather than public rehabilitation. For researchers deciding where to submit or what to cite, the practical takeaway is narrow but real: a journal's presence or absence from Web of Science is a live signal that changes on a timescale of months, not a fixed judgment, and the underlying audit documents are worth reading directly rather than inferring quality from an impact factor alone once it reappears in October.
What to watch: whether Elsevier's other index, Scopus, makes a comparable public accounting for Heliyon and the other mega-journals flagged alongside it (Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Science of the Total Environment, Chemosphere).
Source: Retraction Watch, https://retractionwatch.com/2026/08/07/clarivate-removes-hold-mega-journal-heliyon-after-internal-audit/