Elsevier has retracted 120 papers from a biology journal whose output doubled in a single year

Elsevier's International Journal of Biological Macromolecules has retracted 120 articles since June 2026, and the publisher has said at least one more is coming, according to Retraction Watch, which reported the tally on 12 August 2026. The retraction notices state that the journal identified "systematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process". Almost all of the withdrawn papers appeared in guest edited special issues published in 2024 and 2025.

The growth claim behind the story can be checked without going through anyone's press office. Crossref is the registry where publishers deposit a record for every article they publish, and its public interface will count them. A query for items with 2023 publication dates in the journal returns 4,974. The same query for 2024 returns 9,700, and for 2025 it returns 10,367. The journal roughly doubled its output in one year and then held that level.

The journal's own page on ScienceDirect, checked on 17 August 2026, sets out the economics. It supports open access at an article publishing charge of USD 3,820 excluding taxes, alongside a subscription route with no author fee. It advertises a submission to first decision time of five days, 33 days to a decision after review, 102 days to acceptance and two days from acceptance to online publication. If every one of the 10,367 articles published in 2025 had been open access at the list price, the gross would have exceeded USD 39 million. Many were not, and many authors pay discounted or waived rates, so that figure is a ceiling rather than a revenue estimate. It is still the order of magnitude that makes volume worth defending.

Special issues remain open for business. The journal page currently lists calls for papers, including one on polysaccharides in dairy and dairy alternative matrices with a submission deadline of 1 February 2027, and a running list of special issues and article collections, several dated August 2026. Elsevier told Retraction Watch that the retractions are "almost complete" and that guest editor checks have been "tightened to enable detection of issues as soon as possible".

The notices themselves are public. One, published in August 2026, retracts a review article on cell surface RNAs in hepatocellular carcinoma that the journal had published in volume 330 in 2025. It carries a 2026 digital object identifier and sits in the journal's own erratum stream, free to read, which is how a reader can confirm that these are not merely reported retractions but registered ones.

The pattern was not found by the publisher alone. Retraction Watch reported that Fabian Wittmers, a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University, has flagged more than 300 concerning articles from the journal since April 2025, and that several authors lost multiple papers in the current batch. Elsevier has not published a list of the guest editors involved, or said whether any have been barred from future editorial work.

This is the structural weakness that broke a different publisher three years ago. In 2023, Wiley's Hindawi imprint retracted more than 8,000 articles, more than every publisher's combined total in any previous year, after finding compromised peer review in guest edited special issues. Hindawi banned several hundred guest editors, and Retraction Watch reported at the time that Wiley put the cost at USD 35 million to USD 40 million in lost revenue. Wiley shut four Hindawi journals in May 2023, announced in December 2023 that it would retire the Hindawi brand, and closed a further 19 journals in May 2024, by which point it had retracted more than 11,300 papers from the portfolio.

The problem is not confined to one publisher or one model. On 12 August 2026, Science reported a study by Anna Abalkina of the Free University of Berlin and colleagues that matched advertisements offering authorship slots to published work: of 4,407 unique paper titles advertised between 2021 and 2025, 2,062 matched papers later published at IEEE conferences. IEEE's director of publishing ethics and conduct, Luigi Longobardi, said the society had retracted 1,700 conference papers in 2025 and 1,200 so far in 2026.

What is not yet known is how far the Elsevier count will run. The publisher says the exercise is nearly finished, but has not said how many special issues were affected, how many guest editors were involved, whether the compromised papers are still being cited, or what happens to the article publishing charges collected on work that has now been withdrawn.