Advances in Business & Industrial Marketing Research recognize the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attach the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive.
It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision, the editor is guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact, and unaltered as far as is possible. However, occasionally, circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances. In all cases, our official archives will retain all article versions, including retracted or removed articles.
We designed this policy to address these concerns and to take into account current best practices in the scholarly and library communities. As standards evolve and change, we will revisit this issue and welcome the input of scholarly and library communities. We believe these issues require international standards, and we will actively lobby various information bodies to establish international standards and best practices that the publishing and information industries can adopt.
Article withdrawal
Only used for Articles in Press that represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional, ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Articles that have been accepted for publication but have not been formally published and then found to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are considered to violate our journal ethics guidelines in the view of the editors will be withdrawn. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed from the issue.
Article retraction
Article retraction (see COPE: RETRACTION GUIDELINES) is infringement of professional, ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or editor has long been an occasional feature of the learning world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by several library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by IJAE journals:
- A retraction note titled "Retraction: [article title]" signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent journal issue and listed in the contents list.
- In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
- The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
- The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is "retracted."
- The HTML version of the document is removed.
Article removal: legal limitations
Removing an article from the online database may be necessary in a few cases. The removal of the article will occur when the article is defamatory or infringes others' legal rights, or when the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article if acted upon pose a severe health risk. While the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.
Article replacement
In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a severe health risk, the original article's authors may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances, the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.