Short answer: there is no single, current “Hindawi impact factor” to look up, because Hindawi no longer exists as an independent publisher brand. Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, discontinued the Hindawi name in 2024 after a large, publicly documented paper-mill and compromised-peer-review crisis that led to more than 11,000 article retractions across 2022–2024 and the removal of roughly 19 Hindawi journals from Clarivate’s Web of Science Master Journal List. Former Hindawi journals that survived the cleanup were folded into Wiley’s main open-access portfolio and are now indexed, scored, and published under the Wiley name. This page explains what actually happened, in what order, and what it means if you’re trying to evaluate a specific journal or article that was originally published under the Hindawi name.
What Hindawi Was
Hindawi was a fully open-access academic publisher founded in Cairo, Egypt, publishing dozens of peer-reviewed journals across the sciences, funded through article processing charges (APCs) rather than reader subscriptions — the same business model used by other large OA publishers such as MDPI and Frontiers. Hindawi grew rapidly in the 2010s partly through heavy use of themed, guest-edited Special Issues, in which an external guest editor recruited papers and reviewers around a specific topic. In 2021, Wiley, one of the largest traditional academic publishers, acquired Hindawi, intending to use it to expand Wiley’s own open-access output.
Timeline: The Paper-Mill and Retraction Crisis (2022–2024)
- September 2022: Hindawi announced an initial round of roughly 500 retractions after identifying signs of compromised peer review linked to guest-edited Special Issues.
- October 2022: Hindawi paused publication of new Special Issues across its journals while it investigated the scope of the problem.
- March 2023: Clarivate removed roughly 19 Hindawi journals from the Web of Science Master Journal List, citing peer-review integrity concerns — a delisting event covered in more depth in CASRAI’s impact factor lookup guide. A delisted journal stops receiving Web of Science citation counts and, with them, an Impact Factor.
- April 2023: Wiley and Hindawi announced a further 1,200+ retractions for compromised peer review.
- Through 2023: the retraction total for the year climbed past 8,000 articles — more than had previously been recorded from any single publisher in one year, across all publishers combined, according to Wiley’s own December 2023 disclosure.
- December 2023: Wiley published a whitepaper detailing its retraction process and announced it would discontinue the Hindawi brand name, folding the imprint’s remaining journals into Wiley’s own portfolio. Wiley’s interim leadership also disclosed an estimated $35–40 million in lost revenue tied to the cleanup.
- 2024: the cumulative retraction count across the crisis passed 11,000 articles, and Wiley completed the transition of surviving former-Hindawi journals onto the main Wiley Online Library platform under the Wiley name, retiring the Hindawi imprint entirely.
Why It Happened: Paper Mills and Guest-Edited Special Issues
The root cause, as Wiley itself has described it, was systematic exploitation by paper mills — commercial operations that mass-produce fabricated or templated manuscripts and sell authorship slots or manipulate the review process to get them published. Hindawi’s guest-edited Special Issue model was a structural weak point: an external guest editor with limited oversight from the main editorial office could recruit reviewers and approve submissions with far less scrutiny than a journal’s standard, in-house review process, and paper mills targeted exactly that gap at scale. This is the same underlying mechanism — guest-edited collections with reduced editorial oversight — that research-integrity organizations including the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the United2Act initiative have flagged as a recurring paper-mill vector industry-wide, not something unique to Hindawi. See CASRAI’s guide to identifying predatory journals and publishers and the predatory journal dictionary entry for the broader landscape of publication-integrity red flags this crisis intersects with.
Is Hindawi (or a Former Hindawi Journal) a Predatory Publisher?
Not in the formal sense that term is usually used. A documented, large-scale, publisher-acknowledged peer-review failure exploited by external paper mills is a distinct problem from the classic definition of a “predatory” operation — a publisher designed from the outset to collect fees without providing genuine editorial services. Hindawi was never added to the historical Beall’s List, and CASRAI has not found current, sourced evidence that former-Hindawi titles are listed in Cabells’ Predatory Reports database. That said, the practical effect for a reader is similar either way: content published in an affected journal during the compromised period needs individual verification rather than being trusted on the strength of the journal name alone.
What Happened to Hindawi’s Journals — Where Are They Now
Journals that survived Wiley’s review are no longer published under the Hindawi name or on a separate Hindawi platform. They were absorbed into Wiley’s standard open-access journal portfolio and now appear on Wiley Online Library, under Wiley’s editorial oversight and submission systems, the same as any other Wiley-owned title. Some journals and article backlogs were affected more severely than others depending on how much Special-Issue paper-mill content they had accumulated; the exact editorial fate (continued publication under Wiley, merger with another title, or closure) varies by journal and should be checked on the specific journal’s current homepage rather than assumed.
Impact Factor Status of Former Hindawi Journals
There was never a single “Hindawi” Impact Factor to begin with — like any multi-journal publisher, each Hindawi title was indexed and scored individually by Clarivate, the same publisher-versus-journal distinction that applies when searching for an “IEEE impact factor” or a “Nature impact factor.” The March 2023 Web of Science delisting affected roughly 19 titles directly — those journals stopped accruing citation counts in Web of Science and lost their Impact Factor as a result. Other former-Hindawi journals not caught in that specific delisting may still carry a current, Clarivate-issued Impact Factor under their new Wiley listing. Because status varies title by title and can change again, the reliable way to check is Clarivate’s live Master Journal List lookup for the specific journal name, not a remembered or third-party-aggregated number. CASRAI’s guide to looking up a journal’s current Impact Factor walks through that lookup process in detail, and the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) dictionary entry covers what the metric measures and its limitations.
What This Means If You’re Evaluating a Paper or Considering Submitting
- Evaluating a specific article: check the article and journal directly for a retraction notice rather than assuming a Hindawi-era publication is unaffected — the Retraction Watch Database and the journal’s own site (via CrossMark) are the standard ways to check current retraction status.
- Evaluating a journal for citation or assessment purposes: confirm current Web of Science / Scopus indexing status directly rather than relying on a historical Impact Factor, since the journal may now be delisted, unlisted, or listed under a changed publisher record.
- Considering submitting to a former Hindawi journal: the journal is now operating under Wiley’s standard editorial and peer-review processes, not Hindawi’s. Review the journal’s current editorial board, current Special-Issue policy (if any), and current indexing status on its own terms rather than by reputation carried over from the Hindawi era.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Hindawi still exist?
Not as an independent publisher brand. Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, discontinued the Hindawi name in 2024 following the retraction crisis, and its surviving journals now publish under the Wiley name.
What is Hindawi’s impact factor now?
There is no single figure — each former Hindawi journal is indexed and scored individually, if at all. Roughly 19 titles were removed from the Web of Science Master Journal List in March 2023 and no longer receive an Impact Factor; check the specific journal on Clarivate’s Master Journal List for its current status.
Why were Hindawi journals retracted?
Wiley identified large-scale compromised peer review exploited by paper mills, concentrated in guest-edited Special Issues where oversight was weaker than in standard in-house review. More than 11,000 articles were retracted across 2022–2024 as a result.
Is Hindawi a predatory publisher?
Hindawi was never included on Beall’s List, and this is generally treated as a large-scale peer-review integrity failure rather than a classic predatory-publisher case. The practical caution for readers is similar in either case: verify individual articles and journals rather than trusting the publisher name alone.
Are articles published in former Hindawi journals still valid?
Articles not implicated in the paper-mill retractions remain part of the scholarly record. Because the affected proportion was substantial, it is worth checking any specific Hindawi-era article against the Retraction Watch Database or the journal’s own retraction notices before relying on it.
