Procedure for withdrawing (retracting) published articles

1. General provisions

Retraction is a mechanism for correcting published information and alerting readers that an article contains serious flaws or errors that cannot be relied upon. The purpose of retraction is to ensure the integrity of science, not to punish the authors.

2. Grounds for retracting an article

An article may be retracted in the following cases:

– scientific dishonesty (detection of plagiarism, image manipulation, or data falsification);

– violation of the AI ​​use policy (covert use of AI to generate scientific content, create fictitious results (“hallucinations”) or automatically cite non-existent sources;

– identification of significant calculation or experimental errors that invalidate the article’s conclusions;

–duplicate publication (if the article was previously published in another journal without proper references and permissions);

– ethical violations: lack of consent of research subjects or violation of confidentiality standards

– unreliable authorship (disputes regarding the authorship that were not resolved prior to publication).

3. Initiation and review procedure

A request for retraction may come from authors, readers, reviewers or be initiated by the Editorial Board based on the results of monitoring. The Editorial Board creates a fact-checking commission. In case of suspicion of data manipulation, the Editorial Board may contact the Academic Council of Dnipro University of Technology for expert assessment. The Editorial Board must notify the authors of the identified problems and provide them with an opportunity to give explanations. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief based on the recommendations of the commission and COPE standards.

4. Retraction procedure

If a decision to retract an article is made, a separate document titled “Retraction Notice” is posted on the journal’s open-access website. It includes the article title, authors, publication date, DOI, and a clear explanation of the reasons for retraction (who initiated it and why).

The full text of the article (PDF) remains on the website, but each page is marked with a “RETRACTED” watermark. The article text is not completely removed to preserve the scientific record. In digital registries (DOI), the status of the article is updated to “Retracted.”

5. Sanctions and consequences

In cases of deliberate undisclosed use of AI for data generation or falsification, the Editorial Board has the right not to consider subsequent manuscripts from these authors for a specified period. The Editorial Board may notify the administration of the institution where the authors are employed about the fact of the serious violation of scientific ethics.

6. Difference from correction

If the error is minor, does not affect the overall conclusions of the study, and was made unintentionally, a Correction (Erratum or Corrigendum) is issued instead of a retraction. This publication contains only a list of corrections to the original text.