Clarivate has removed Cureus, the Springer Nature-owned open-access medical mega-journal, from the Web of Science Master Journal List, after placing it on indexing hold thirteen months earlier. The delisting means Cureus will not receive a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in the 2025-data-year Journal Citation Reports release (issued June 2026) or in any release going forward unless it is reinstated. For research administration offices that field questions about where to publish, and for researchers who already have papers in the journal, that status change has concrete, practical consequences worth walking through.
What happened, and when
Clarivate placed Cureus on hold in Web of Science indexing in September 2024 — the same month it placed the Elsevier/Cell Press mega-journal Heliyon on hold. A “hold” pauses indexing of new content while Clarivate reviews the title; it does not retroactively remove already-indexed articles. In October 2025, Clarivate formally removed Cureus from the Web of Science Master Journal List, converting the hold into a full delisting.
Clarivate has not published a detailed public rationale for the action. Secondary reporting on the case — and the pattern Clarivate has applied to other mega-journal holds around the same period — points to a sustained period of elevated retraction activity and concerns about article-quality control at the scale Cureus was publishing, rather than a single identified incident. Treat the precise causal mechanism as not independently confirmed by Clarivate itself; what is confirmed is the indexing outcome and its timing.
Cureus is published by Springer Nature, which acquired the title in December 2022. It launched in 2009 as PeerEMed and was renamed Cureus in December 2012 (ISSN 2168-8184). It operates a high-volume, open-access general-medical publishing model with pre-publication peer review plus an optional post-publication commentary layer, and maintains its own in-house reader-driven score called the Scholarly Impact Quotient (SIQ) — a journal-created metric that is easy to confuse with, but entirely distinct from, a Clarivate JIF or a Scopus CiteScore.
What delisting actually changes
- No current or future JIF. Because Cureus is off the Master Journal List, it is not eligible for a Journal Impact Factor in the June 2026 JCR release or any subsequent one, unless and until Clarivate reinstates it. Any JIF figure attached to Cureus now is necessarily historical.
- Historical figures don’t disappear, but they stop updating. Cureus‘s last active JIF figures (reported in the roughly 1.2-1.3 range across different tracking sources for different release years) remain the last real numbers on record. They will not be refreshed, and citations accruing after the delisting are not being folded into any new calculation.
- The publisher’s own marketing may lag the indexing reality. As of this writing, Cureus’s own homepage still describes the journal as having “an Impact Factor of 1.3” without noting the Web of Science hold or delisting. That’s a useful, concrete illustration of why a publisher’s self-reported metric on its own site should never substitute for checking indexing status directly.
- Articles already published in Cureus keep whatever indexing status they had at the time. Delisting is a forward-looking change to the journal’s ongoing eligibility, not a retroactive erasure of the existing literature record in databases like PubMed (Cureus remains PubMed Central-indexed independent of the Web of Science decision).
Why this matters for CVs, tenure files, and grant panels
Many promotion, tenure, and grant-review processes still lean on JIF as a fast, if imperfect, proxy for venue quality — despite the field’s own steady move away from that practice under frameworks like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and CoARA. A researcher with a Cureus paper on their CV published before the delisting can accurately cite the JIF that applied at the time of publication, but should expect that a reviewer who looks the journal up today will find no current Web of Science entry, and should be prepared to explain that context rather than let it stand as an unexplained gap. RA offices fielding these questions should distinguish, in guidance to faculty, between “this journal never had impact-factor standing” and “this journal had standing that was subsequently withdrawn” — committees often read the two very differently, and the difference is a factual, checkable one.
For researchers currently deciding where to submit, the practical takeaway is narrower than “avoid mega-journals”: it’s “check current indexing status directly before submitting, not the publisher’s landing-page claim, and not a journal’s reputation from two or three years ago.”
The Heliyon comparison: holds aren’t always permanent
The Cureus case is worth reading alongside the closely-timed Heliyon hold, because the two mega-journals’ outcomes diverged. Both were placed on hold by Clarivate in the same month, September 2024. But where Cureus‘s hold converted into a full Master Journal List delisting in October 2025, Elsevier ran an internal editorial audit of Heliyon that resulted in several hundred retractions and corrections, and Clarivate lifted Heliyon‘s hold afterward, restoring its path back toward a JIF in a subsequent JCR release. The two cases together illustrate that a Web of Science hold is a real, consequential status but not necessarily a terminal one — the outcome depends on what the publisher does next and whether Clarivate is satisfied with the remediation, not just on the fact that a hold was imposed.
How to evaluate mega-journal quality signals going forward
The Cureus and Heliyon cases are a useful prompt to formalize what “checking a journal” should actually mean, rather than relying on a remembered impression of the title’s reputation:
- Check current Web of Science / JCR status directly at Clarivate’s Master Journal List, rather than trusting a publisher’s own metrics page, a citation manager’s cached record, or a colleague’s recollection.
- Check Scopus/CiteScore independently — Web of Science and Scopus indexing decisions are made separately, and a title can be affected in one index and not the other.
- Look for retraction-rate and correction signals, not just the headline metric. A sharp rise in retractions or corrections at a title, or public reporting on paper-mill activity, is a leading indicator that often precedes an indexing action.
- Treat journal-invented metrics as supplementary, not equivalent. A journal’s own reader-engagement score (like Cureus‘s SIQ), download counts, or “top-cited” badges are not calibrated the same way as a JIF or CiteScore and shouldn’t be presented interchangeably with them in a CV or biosketch.
- Assess the article, not only the journal, wherever the process allows it — the core recommendation of DORA and CoARA, and the most durable defense against any single journal’s indexing status changing after the fact.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cureus still peer reviewed?
Yes. The Web of Science delisting is an indexing and impact-factor eligibility decision by Clarivate, not a determination that the journal has stopped operating pre-publication peer review. Editorial and peer-review practices are a separate question from indexing status, and should be evaluated separately.
Can a delisted journal be reinstated?
Yes, in principle — Clarivate’s own hold process (as illustrated by the parallel Heliyon case) allows a title to be restored to active indexing after remediation, though a full delisting from the Master Journal List, as opposed to a hold, is a more significant status to reverse. There is no public timeline for a possible Cureus reinstatement as of this writing.
Does this affect papers already published in Cureus?
It changes the journal’s ongoing indexing status, not the existence of already-published articles in other databases such as PubMed/PubMed Central. It does mean those articles won’t be part of any future Cureus JIF calculation, because there won’t be one unless the journal is reinstated.
Should researchers avoid submitting to Cureus now?
That is an editorial and career-strategy decision for the researcher and their department, not something this article prescribes. The relevant fact to weigh is that, as of this writing, a Cureus paper will not carry a current Journal Impact Factor, which matters more in some assessment contexts (e.g., committees still weighting JIF heavily) than others (e.g., DORA-aligned or article-level assessment).
Last verified 2026-08-16. Web of Science indexing status is a live, checkable fact that can change — confirm current status directly at Clarivate’s Master Journal List before relying on any figure in this article, including this one.
