The number keeps moving in one direction. Since June 2026, the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, an Elsevier title, has retracted 120 papers, all of them from guest-edited special issues, and the publisher says at least 'one more retraction is coming.' [1] The count is not a final tally. It is a running one.
The retraction notices are blunt about why. They cite 'systematic, coordinated, and widespread manipulation of the peer-review process,' the language journals reach for when the failure is not a few bad papers slipping through but the review mechanism itself being gamed at scale. [1] Elsevier says it 'became aware of possible systematic manipulation and other issues such as plagiarism, image duplication, and authorship issues' in 2025, which set off the wider investigation now producing the retractions. [1]
The volume tells its own part. The journal's output nearly doubled, from roughly 5,000 articles in 2023 to more than 9,600 in 2024, then past 10,300 in 2025, with over 4,000 already published in 2026. [1] A journal does not double its throughput by accident, and the special-issue format is the accelerator: a guest editor is handed the keys to solicit, review, and wave through a themed batch of papers, and when the guest editor is compromised, so is every safeguard behind them.
This is not a novel failure mode; it is the recurring one. Retraction Watch situates the case against a lineage of the same wound: Hindawi's 10,000-plus retractions, a Springer Nature batch of 34 papers, an entire special issue pulled at Annals of Operations Research. [1] Guest-edited special issues 'appear to be particularly vulnerable,' the account notes, which by now reads less like a discovery than a standing weather report. [1]
The practical cost lands on people who did nothing wrong. A retraction is a correction that arrives late, after the fake result has been cited, built on, and folded into the literature that clinicians and other researchers treat as vetted. One journal is now 120 corrections into cleaning up a mess that took years to make, and it is not finished counting.
