In principle, journal editors do not possess unilateral authority to determine the publication status of articles. Editorial decisions regarding publication are contingent upon the policies established by the journal's editorial board and are subject to pertinent legal obligations pertaining to defamation, copyright infringement, duplicate publication, and plagiarism. Published articles are intended to remain intact and unaltered to the greatest extent feasible. However, situations may arise necessitating the withdrawal or deletion of previously published articles, albeit under exceptional circumstances.

The retraction of published articles may be initiated by journal editors, authors, and/or their affiliated institutions. In certain instances, such retractions may necessitate the issuance of apologies for prior inaccuracies and/or expressions of gratitude to individuals who identified the errors. A retraction of published scientific articles must be accompanied by a declaration indicating that the original article should not be relied upon for future research endeavors.

Article withdrawal

Article withdrawal may be warranted in cases where the initial version of the article contains errors or may have been inadvertently submitted to both IJLSM and/or another publisher. Furthermore, withdrawal may ensue due to violations of scientific ethical standards, such as duplicate submissions, falsified authorship claims, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, data manipulation, or similar transgressions. Authors who recognize such ethical breaches within their articles are encouraged to formally withdraw their submissions by submitting a withdrawal statement to the IJLSM editorial board.

Article retraction

Retractions are issued when articles are found to contravene scientific ethical codes, including duplicate submissions, false authorship claims, plagiarism, data manipulation, fictitious authorship, or related infractions. Retractions also serve to rectify errors in submission or publication. The decision to retract an article is typically made by the author or editor upon the recommendation of the IJLSM editorial board. Various forms of retraction may be employed by IJLSM, including:

- Pre-publication retraction notices, whereby the manuscript is returned to the author along with a retraction letter from the Chief Editor;
- Post-publication retraction mechanisms, involving the display of a retraction notice preceding the online article, the addition of a "retracted" watermark to the PDF version, and the removal of the HTML version.

Article removal: legal constraints

In exceedingly rare instances, article removal from the IJLSM online database may be warranted due to clear defamatory content, fraudulent assertions, infringement of legal rights, court orders, or threats to national security. In such cases, while metadata (title and authors) will be preserved, the article text will be replaced with a notification indicating its removal for legal reasons.

Article replacement

In situations where the original article poses significant risks, authors may opt to retract the flawed version and replace it with a corrected iteration. Retraction procedures will be followed, with the retraction notice containing a link to the corrected republished article and a document history.