- The four publishing remedies at a glance
- Retraction: when findings cannot be trusted
- Correction, corrigendum and erratum
- Expression of concern: the interim signal
- Redaction vs retraction: a different kind of removal
- Answer-first questions editors ask
- What this means for editors and research offices
- Looking ahead
Editors, research-integrity officers and authors routinely use “retraction”, “correction”, “expression of concern” and “redaction” as if they were interchangeable. They are not. Retraction in academic publishing is a formal, permanent withdrawal of a paper’s standing, reserved for findings that can no longer be trusted — a different remedy, with a different evidence threshold, from a correction, an expression of concern, or a redaction. Conflating the terms slows investigations and can misstate a case’s severity to funders, tenure committees, and the public record.
The four publishing remedies at a glance
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), whose retraction guidelines were updated to version 3 in August 2025, and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) both treat these as distinct editorial tools, not synonyms. The table below sets out the working distinctions research offices and editorial staff need.
| Remedy | What it means | Typical trigger | Who issues it | Effect on the original article |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retraction | Formal, permanent withdrawal from the reliable literature | Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, unethical research, compromised peer review | Editor, sometimes jointly with the publisher | Article stays online, clearly watermarked “RETRACTED” |
| Correction (corrigendum/erratum) | Fixes a specific, non-fatal error | Author error (corrigendum) or production error (erratum) | Authors (corrigendum) or journal (erratum) | Article stands; correction notice is linked to it |
| Expression of concern | Interim public notice pending an unresolved inquiry | Inconclusive evidence or an ongoing institutional investigation | Editor | Article stands, flagged as under review |
| Redaction | Removal or masking of specific sensitive content only | Legal, privacy, or confidentiality requirement (e.g. identifiable patient data) | Publisher, usually on legal or data-protection advice | Only the redacted portion is withheld; the rest of the record stands |
Retraction: when findings cannot be trusted
Per COPE’s 2025 retraction guidelines, “the purpose of retraction is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity, not to punish the authors.” A retraction disavows the paper’s conclusions; it does not usually remove the text itself, which stays accessible but permanently marked as unreliable.
COPE and ICMJE both point to a similar set of grounds for retraction:
- Unreliable findings — from honest error (miscalculation, flawed methodology) or from misconduct (fabricated or falsified data)
- Plagiarism — appropriating another party’s words, data, or ideas without credit
- Redundant or duplicate publication — the same findings published elsewhere without cross-reference or permission
- Unethical research — studies that breached human- or animal-subject ethics requirements
- Compromised peer review or undisclosed conflicts of interest that could have biased the editorial decision
A retraction can be initiated by authors, editors, or the publisher, but COPE is explicit that the editor holds final decision authority, consistent with editorial independence — the publisher’s role is to support the investigation and help issue the notice, not to make the call.
Correction, corrigendum and erratum: fixing the record without withdrawing it
A correction is the appropriate remedy when an error is real but does not undermine the paper’s overall conclusions — a mislabelled figure, an incorrect affiliation, a transposed digit in a table. Two related terms are often used loosely but have a real distinction:
- Corrigendum — a correction of an error introduced by the authors themselves
- Erratum — a correction of an error introduced by the journal during production
Both are published as a linked notice attached to the original article, which otherwise remains part of the reliable record. A correction is not a lesser form of retraction — it is a separate remedy for a separate class of problem, and treating minor corrections as reputational events discourages the self-correction that COPE and ICMJE actively encourage.
Expression of concern: the interim signal
An expression of concern (EOC) is not a verdict. COPE’s guidance describes it as the appropriate step when an editor is uncertain about a publication’s reliability because of insufficient information, delays in institutional response, or an investigation that will not conclude quickly. Rather than wait — and risk the paper being cited or acted on in the meantime — the editor publishes a notice flagging the concern while the inquiry continues.
An EOC typically resolves in one of three ways: retraction, correction, or a formal confirmation that the concerns did not hold up. Editorial and research-integrity teams should track EOCs as open cases, not closed ones, and revisit them on a defined schedule rather than leaving them unresolved indefinitely.
Redaction vs retraction: a different kind of removal
This is where terminology confusion is most common — and most consequential. Redaction is not a recognised category within the COPE/ICMJE retraction-correction-EOC taxonomy. It is a records-management and legal term for the selective removal or masking of specific sensitive content — identifiable patient information, confidential commercial data, material under a court order — while the rest of the document remains intact and in force.
Retraction, by contrast, withdraws the paper’s standing as a whole. A journal might redact one identifying detail from a case report to comply with data-protection law without touching the paper’s scientific conclusions; that is not equivalent to, and should never be reported internally as, a retraction. Research offices logging cases for funder reporting should keep these as separate fields — collapsing them into one “removed” category misrepresents both the scale and the cause of the action.
Answer-first questions editors ask
What does it mean if a publication is retracted?
A retracted publication has been formally withdrawn from the reliable scholarly record by its editor, usually because of unreliable data, misconduct, or a serious ethical breach. The article typically remains online, watermarked “RETRACTED”, so the record stays transparent rather than being erased.
What is the purpose of retractions in academic publishing?
Retraction exists to correct the literature and protect its integrity, not to punish authors, per COPE’s own guidelines. It warns future readers, citing authors, and clinicians not to rely on the paper’s findings or conclusions, limiting downstream harm from erroneous or fraudulent results.
Do retracted studies still get cited?
Yes — research tracked via PubMed Central and the Retraction Watch database shows retracted papers continue to be cited after retraction, sometimes for years, often because citing authors are unaware of the notice. This is why prompt, linked, machine-readable retraction notices matter so much for discovery.
Can a retracted paper be published again?
A substantially revised version can sometimes be resubmitted if the authors have genuinely corrected the underlying problem, but this must be done transparently, with the editor informed of the paper’s history. It is never appropriate to resubmit a corrected version without disclosing the prior retraction.
What this means for editors and research offices
For journals, precise terminology is a workflow issue as much as an editorial-ethics one: COPE’s flowcharts, ICMJE’s recommendations, and most editorial-management systems expect cases to be tagged with the correct remedy from the outset, because that tag drives downstream indexing signals sent to CrossRef, PubMed, and DOI registries.
For research offices, the stakes are similar. Case files, funder disclosures, and research-administration compliance reports should mirror the same four-way distinction rather than defaulting to informal language like “the paper was pulled.” Where a case originates in a dispute over who contributed what to a flawed paper, structured contributor statements — the kind increasingly requested under authorship policies — can help institutions establish individual accountability before deciding whether the remedy is a correction or a full retraction. Internal glossaries and training materials can also be cross-referenced against a maintained dictionary of research-administration terminology rather than drafted informally office by office.
The rise of paper-mill detection tools has also pushed COPE to add explicit guidance on batch retractions — cases where dozens or hundreds of articles from the same source are retracted together for the same systemic reason. That volume makes definitional discipline more urgent: a research office tracking hundreds of cases needs the four categories kept clean to report accurately to funders and institutional leadership.
Looking ahead
As journals face more paper-mill-driven batch retractions and more AI-assisted-writing disclosures, the boundary between “correction” and “retraction” will keep being tested in ways COPE’s earlier guidelines did not originally anticipate. Editors and research offices that maintain a precise, shared vocabulary — retraction, correction, expression of concern, and redaction as four distinct tools rather than one blurred category — will be better placed to report consistently, protect the record, and respond quickly when the next systemic case emerges.
