Allegation of Research Misconduct and Retraction
Allegation of Research Misconduct
Research misconduct involves fabrication, falsification, citation manipulation, or plagiarism in conducting, reviewing, or reporting research and writing articles. When authors are found guilty of such misconduct or other serious irregularities in published articles, Editors must maintain the scientific record's accuracy and integrity.
In suspected misconduct cases, Editors and the Editorial Board will follow COPE's best practices to resolve the complaint and address the issue fairly. This includes an investigation by the Editors. Manuscripts found to contain misconduct will be rejected. If a published paper is found to have misconduct, a retraction will be issued and linked to the original article.
The first step is to validate the allegation and assess if it aligns with the definition of research misconduct. This initial step also includes determining if the complainants have any conflicts of interest.
If there is a possibility of scientific misconduct or significant research irregularities, the allegations are shared with the corresponding author, who is asked to provide a detailed response on behalf of all coauthors. After evaluating the response, further review and expert involvement (e.g., statistical reviewers) may be necessary. If it appears unlikely that misconduct occurred, clarifications, additional analyses, or corrections published as letters to the editor, along with a correction notice, may suffice.
Institutions are expected to conduct thorough investigations of scientific misconduct allegations. Authors, journals, and institutions must ensure the scientific record's accuracy. By appropriately addressing concerns about scientific misconduct and taking necessary actions, such as corrections, retractions with replacement, and retractions, Indonesian Journal of Community Services journal will uphold the scientific record's validity and integrity.
CORRECTION
A formal correction is appropriate when an article contains a material error or omission, but its principal findings and conclusions remain reliable.
A correction may address errors involving:
Facts, values, calculations, equations, or units; methods or software descriptions; tables, figures, labels, or legends; citations or references; author names, affiliations, or contributions; funding or competing-interest disclosures; ethics, consent, permit, or safety statements; data-availability information; or copyright and licensing information.
A correction notice must identify the affected article, explain the error and correction, state whether the conclusions are affected, and link permanently to the article.
RETRACTION
The articles published in Al-Kauniyah: Jurnal Biologi will be considered to retract in the publication if:
- It has a clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).
- The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication).
- It contains plagiarism.
- It reports an unethical research.
The mechanism of retraction follows the Retraction Guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) which can be accessed at https://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf.
