The editorial staff of the Historical Ethnology journal can issue a retraction of a publication (withdraw its text). In compliance with the recommendations of the international Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Association of Science Editors and Publishers, retraction is a mechanism of correcting published information and notifying readers that the publication contains seriously flawed and inaccurate data which cannot be relied upon. Unreliable data may result from honest error or from deliberate misconduct.
Grounds for retraction (withdrawal) of the article are the following:
- detection of plagiarism of any form, including a significant amount of non-formalized quotations, paraphrasing, or assuming rights to the results of someone else’s research, also translation of an article or its substantial part from the material that had already been published;
- redundant publication of an article (or its substantial part) in several periodicals;
- detection of fabrication, falsifications or unscrupulous manipulation of data in the article;
- detection of major errors in the article (for instance, incorrect interpretation of the results), which call into question its scientific value;
- incorrect list of the authors (a person who made a substantive contribution to conducting the research have been omitted; a person who has not participated in the authorship of the manuscript text has been included);
- failure to disclose a conflict of interest between the author and reviewers;
- other violations of the journal’s ethic principles.
The procedure of an article withdrawal (retraction) may be initiated by:
— the article author who sends a written grounded appeal to the journal’s editorial office about withdrawing the article;
— the journal’s editor-in-chief who prepares a justified report regarding the reasons of the publication retraction;
— editorial staff of another journal that has sent an inquiry to the editorial office of the Historical Ethnology journal;
— other persons who provided evidence of research ethics violation by the article author(s) (for example, a party representing a competing interest).
The procedure of retracting a publication in the Historical Ethnology journal:
1. Upon the author’s or any other person’s inquiry providing facts of research ethics violation in the paper, the journal’s editorial board appoints a commission to conduct a comprehensive study of the case, taking into consideration all the evidence and options of re-examining the publication ethics;
2. Upon making the decision to retract an article, the editorial staff specifies the reason of retraction in the protocol (in case of detecting plagiarism — indicating the sources of plagiarism), and the date of retraction.
3. If the commission detects flawed data in only a small section of the publication (which contains solid data otherwise), a corrected section of the article is to be published in the following printed issue after the commission meeting with an indication of the error and the description of the corrected article. In the electronic version of the journal correction is implemented by replacing the pdf-file of the article and indicating the error in that file and its pages on the journal website.
4. A protocol which contains the date of the meeting, the list of participants, results of the expert evaluation, the well-founded decision, and an appropriate form (see further) are submitted to the Council for Scientific Publication Ethics of the Association of Science Editors and Publishers (for entering information into the single database of retracted publications):
— full name of the author and the title of the publication;
— the title of the periodical from which the text is being retracted;
— the initiator of the publication retraction;
— grounds for retracting the publication and the date of making the decision;
— a link to the journal webpage which contains information about the retraction;
—DOI of the publication (if available);
— subject matter.
5. Information about retracted publications is forwarded to scientific databases — NEL (the National Electronic Library), CyberLeninka. When an application for retraction is submitted, information about the publication and the full text remain on eLibrary.ru and in CyberLeninka, but information about retraction is added (the caption RETRACTED and the date of retraction are printed on the electronic version of the text, the article title is marked respectively in the list of contents of the issue). Retracted articles and links from them are excluded from RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index) and are not taken into account when calculating indices.
6. The editorial staff has discretion to make a decision regarding further cooperation with authors of retracted articles (complete refusal to cooperate, refusal to cooperate for a certain period of time, commissioning an additional expert evaluation of a submission in case of subsequent cooperation).
