A decision to retract an article — the official withdrawal (annulment) of a previously published scientific paper, including at the author’s request — is made by the Editorial Board in cases where violations of publication ethics or other significant shortcomings are identified that make the results of the study unreliable.

Grounds for retraction may include, but are not limited to:

• detection of errors that significantly affect the results or conclusions of the study;

• plagiarism or improper borrowing of text, ideas, data, or research results;

• failure to provide appropriate references to the original sources of data;

• duplicate publication of the same article in another journal without proper justification;

• inclusion of individuals as authors who did not make a substantial scientific contribution to the research, or exclusion of authors who did make such a contribution;

• detection of an unethical or compromised peer-review process;

• the presence of a conflict of interest that may have influenced or did influence the results of the study.