Bioengineered has lost its spot in Clarivate’s Web of Science index, as of its April update. In 2021, journal editors launched an investigation when submissions spiked and several authors of submitted and accepted articles asked for authorship changes – both hallmarks of paper mill activity.
The probe looked at hundreds of papers and put in place several measures to strengthen editorial processes, such as asking authors to submit raw data, enhanced vetting of peer reviewers and editor training, according to a June 2023 post about the incident on the publisher’s blog. But in late March, a group of sleuths led by Rene Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, posted a preprint at arXiv.org that found hundreds of papers with questionable images remain unmarked. The journal now faces up to a two-year embargo before it can rejoin the citation index.
