Retraction & Withdrawal of Articles

Journal of Accounting Inquiry Policy

It is a general principle of scientific communication that journal editors are solely responsible and independent for deciding which articles submitted to the journal will be published. In making these decisions, editors are guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by legal requirements regarding defamation, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. The result of this principle is the importance of scientific archives as a permanent record of scientific transactions. Published articles should remain available, accurate, and unaltered as far as possible. However, there are very rare circumstances in which an article that has been published must be retracted or even removed. Such action should not be taken lightly and can only occur in exceptional circumstances. In all cases, our archive in the Journal of Accounting Inquiry will retain all versions of the article, including those that have been withdrawn or deleted.

Article Withdrawal
Only used for Articles in Press that represent an early version of the article and may contain errors, or may have been submitted twice by mistake. On rare occasions, an article may constitute a violation of professional ethical standards, such as duplicate submission, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or similar issues. Article in Press (an article that has been accepted for publication but has not yet been officially published and does not have complete volume/issue/page information) that contain errors, or are found to be unintentional duplicates of other published articles, or are determined to violate our journal's ethical guidelines in the editor's opinion (such as double submission, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or similar), may be ‘Withdrawn’ from the Journal of Accounting Inquiry. Retracted means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with an HTML and PDF page stating that the article has been retracted in accordance with the Journal of Accounting Inquiry's Policy on Retraction of Articles in Press, with a link to the current policy document.

Article Retraction
Violations of professional ethical codes, such as duplicate submission, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, data fraud, or similar. Sometimes retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. Retraction of articles by authors or editors under the advice of members of the scientific community has long been a feature of the academic world. Standards for handling retractions have been developed by a number of libraries and scientific bodies, and these best practices have been adopted for article retractions by Elsevier:

A retraction notice titled ‘Retraction: [article title]’ signed by the author(s) and/or editor(s) is published in the next issue of the journal and listed in the table of contents.
In electronic versions, a link is provided to the original article.
Online articles are preceded by a screen displaying the retraction notice. The link is resolved to this screen; readers can then proceed to the article itself.
The original article is retained unchanged except for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on every page that the article has been ‘retracted.’
The HTML version of the document is removed.
Article deletion: legal limitations
In very limited cases, an article may need to be deleted from the online database. This will only occur if the article clearly defames someone, infringes on someone else's legal rights, or if the article, or we have strong reason to expect it, becomes the subject of a court order, or if the article, if pursued, could pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, although the metadata (Title and Author) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement
In cases where the article, if pursued, could pose a serious health risk, the original author may wish to withdraw the original defective document and replace it with a corrected version. In such cases, the withdrawal procedure will be followed with the difference that the database withdrawal notice will publish a link to the republished, corrected article and the document history.