WITHDRAWAL & RETRACTION POLICY
A core principle of scholarly communication is that published articles form a permanent and citable part of the academic record. Once published, articles should, to the greatest extent possible, remain available, accurate, and unaltered. However, exceptional circumstances may necessitate the withdrawal, retraction, or replacement of an article. Such actions are taken only in clearly warranted cases and in accordance with international best practices, including the COPE Retraction Guidelines.
1. Article Withdrawal
Article withdrawal applies to Articles in Press — manuscripts that have been accepted for publication but not yet formally published in an issue. Withdrawal may occur where an Article in Press is identified as an unintentional duplicate of an already-published article, or where it is found to violate the journal's publication ethics guidelines (e.g., through multiple submissions, false authorship claims, plagiarism, fraudulent data, or similar misconduct.
When an article is withdrawn, its HTML and PDF content are removed and replaced with a page explicitly stating that Diwan has withdrawn the article, along with the grounds for withdrawal and a link to the current version of this policy.
2. Article Retraction
Retraction is applied to published articles in cases of serious ethical violations — including multiple submissions, false authorship claims, plagiarism, and fraudulent data — or, in rare cases, to correct significant errors that undermine the reliability of the findings. Retraction procedures comply with the COPE Retraction Guidelines. The following practices apply:
a. A retraction notice titled "Retraction: [article title]", signed by the authors and/or the Editor-in-Chief, is published in the paginated section of the next available issue and included in the table of contents.
b. The electronic retraction notice is linked to the original article.
c. In the online version, a retraction notice screen is displayed before the article, with a link to the original.
d. The original article is retained in its entirety with a clearly visible 'RETRACTED' watermark on each page of the PDF version.
e. The HTML version of the retracted article is removed.
