Retraction is a notification of readers that the article findings are invalid. Retractions are issued if there is a clear evidence that the results are unreliable, this can be because of misconduct or honest error.

Retraction can be requested by:

• All authors/author/coauthors of the article.
• The editorial board at the request of the reader, institution, publisher or owner of the journal, other subjects.

Most often, the reason for retraction is identifying of errors by authors in the research, which they noticed already after the publication of the article and want to correct them.

In case when the editorial office receives a complaint, i.e. the initiator of the retraction is not the author/authors of the article, but other subjects (reader, institution, publisher or owner of the journal, etc.), the editorial office is obliged to conduct own thorough investigation of the reported incident. Only based on the results of this investigation, a decision on retraction can be made, about which the authors of the article must be informed.

The reasons of the article retraction are the following:

• The results of the manuscript have previously been published in other editions without proper referencing, permission or justification.
• The article contains plagiarism.
• The article contains inconsistent data.
• The article contains fabricated data.
• An honest error was made during the research (technical failure, equipment failure, analytical error), discovered when trying to reproduce the experiment.
• During the study, a deliberate mistake was made (violation of legal principles or legislative requirements, ethical violations, copyright infringement, improper interpretation of the research result, analytical or experimental error, etc.).
• If the article reproduces graphic material that was previously published in another study and/or journal, without obtaining the permission of the author of this study or the publisher of the journal where it was previously published.

A retraction notice takes place in the printed and online versions of the next issue of the journal (as a separate object, which is also noted in the contents of the issue).

According to COPE guidelines (COPE Council. COPE Guidelines: Retraction Guidelines.), retracted articles are not removed from the online version of the journal, but they are kept on the website with a note of retraction. In such cases, when following a link to a retracted article, the reader sees an announcement on the screen about the retraction of the article, a link in which redirects the reader to a page from which he can access the article. At the same time, the watermark “retracted article” is placed on the text of the article.

In very rare cases related to a violation of law, privacy, or serious health risk, a manuscript will be removed from the journal’s website. Bibliographic information about the article is retained to ensure the integrity of the journal’s content, and the retraction notice must clearly state why the full text of the article has been removed.

The retraction notifice must include:

• complete bibliographic data of the article;
• date of retraction;
• reasons for retracting the article;
• the initiator of the article retraction (all authors/co-authors, the editorial board at the request of the reader, institution, publisher or owner of the journal, other subjects);
• the source of information about the violations that caused the retraction of the article (the names of the applicants can be mentioned only after they have given permission);
• details of the incident that caused the retraction.

We propose to fill in the form to retract the article.

The retraction notice is also sent to the scientometric databases, in which the article is indexed, as well as aggregators of the journal’s content.

The retraction notice must appear on all online search options that may be used to view the retracted publication.

We advise to use the recommendations of the European Association of Scientific Editors to retract the article.

In case of retractions, please write to us at head_armgpublishing@ssu.edu.ua.