Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication such as infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data etc. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by the publisher:

l A retraction note titled "Retraction: [article title]" is published in the CNKI database.

l The HTML version of the document is removed from the journal website.

Article Removal: Legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others' legal rights, or where 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, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, 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 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 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.

Erratum & Corrigendum

In the instance where errors are introduced to the article by the publisher an erratum will be published to the original article. All publisher-introduced changes are highlighted to the author at the proof stage and any errors are ideally identified by the author and corrected by the publisher before final publication.

Should the author wish to publish to a change to their article that at any time after acceptance a corrigendum will be published? Authors should contact the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, who will determine the impact of the change and decide on the appropriate course of action.