Withdrawal Policy

This policy follows the National Library of Medicine's guidance on retractions and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) concerning corrections and retractions.

Article Withdrawal

This applies only to Articles in Press — early versions of articles that have been accepted for publication but not yet formally published, and which do not yet have complete volume, issue, or page information. These sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice; less frequently, they may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, or fraudulent use of data.

An Article in Press that contains such an error, is discovered to be an accidental duplicate of another published article, or is found by the editors to violate IJPR's publishing ethics guidelines, may be "withdrawn." Withdrawn means the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with a page simply stating that the article has been withdrawn in accordance with IJPR's Article in Press Withdrawal policy, with a link to this policy document.

Article Retraction

A retraction addresses infringements of professional ethical codes — such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, or fraudulent use of data — in an already-published article. Occasionally a retraction is used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors, or by the editor on the advice of members of the scholarly community, has long been an occasional feature of scholarly publishing, and IJPR follows the best practice developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies for handling it.

• A retraction note titled "Retraction: [article title]," signed by the authors and/or the editor, is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in its contents.
• In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article; the reader lands on a screen containing the retraction note before proceeding to the article itself.
• The original article is retained unchanged, save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on every page that it is "retracted."
• The HTML version of the document is removed.

Article Removal: Legal Limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This occurs only where the article is clearly defamatory, infringes others' legal rights, is or is reasonably expected to become the subject of a court order, or where the article — if acted upon — might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances the metadata (title and authors) is retained, but the text is replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement

Where an article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the retraction procedure is followed, with the difference that the database's retraction notice publishes a link to the corrected, re-published article and a history of the document.

Last updated on 20th September 2026