As a former journal editor of a reputable journal I'd like to say that it is not all about the author and their academic careers. It is also about the profession and the scholarly publishing industry.

Once a paper is submitted the paper immediately goes through a procedure, roughly as follows: 1). Initial checking by journal admin staff to ensure word length, etc., is adhered to/ initial plagiarism check; 2) initial read and review by the Senior Editor. If the paper is worthy on a quick inspection it is sent to two or more Associate Editors; 3) assessment by Associate Editors. If the paper is worthy of double blind review it is sent to at least 4-6 anonymous peer reviewers (many will decline to review if they are busy, therefore as an editor one usually over-compensates to ensure at least 3 independent peer reviews). 4) Then there is the process of peer review.

So within the first few days of submission, the intellectual effort of at least 7-9 people has been called upon. Deciding to "withdraw" a paper because a writer decides they do not like the journal is poor form indeed. It almost certainly means the editor will look askance at another submission by that author. Why did the writer submit it if they were not serious?

Withdrawing *after peer review has begun*, is dishonest, mean-spirited, and wasteful of the time and energies of: a) accomplished Editors; b) intelligent and ambitious Associate Editors, c) dedicated administrative staff; d) honourable peer reviewers who are performing a gratuitous labour of love for the discipline and profession.

Don't do it. Research your journal, choose an appropriate one, and then submit it and be prepared to follow the process to its conclusion.

Retracting a paper *once it has been accepted* is completely dishonourable, duplicitous and mean-spirited.

BTW: 1. Reputable journals are only suitable for reputable work. Not all academics produce reputable work, and their work is best suited to lower-tier journals. 2. Time spent publishing in lower tier journals is not wasted time. In the process, one learns to write better and, in time, one can produce papers worthy of reputable journals. 3. Publishing in a lower tier journal is better than being rejected by a "reputable" journal and not being published at all.

Yes, it is possible to retract/withdraw a paper before signing the copyright agreement. After you have signed the copyright agreement, it will be difficult. Eric, Chief Editor

It is going to be very hard to do but it is certainly worth a try. The fact is once the article has been published it is already out there and a lot will depend on the agreement that you had with the journal. So look at the fine print again to see what your rights are and what are the rights of the journal and take it from there. Some might allow you to publish elsewhere.

Article Retraction

https://www.elsevier.com/about/publishing-guidelines/policies/article-withdrawal

The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. 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 Elsevier:

A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.

In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.

The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.

The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

The HTML version of the document is removed.

Good responses here - it is extremely difficult and, in most cases unlikely. Perhaps the main point to make is, in the first instance, do your 'homework' and target a journal that is best for your work. That way - you avoid facing a situation like this. In this case Muhammad, I guess it might be a case of 'once bitten, twice shy'.

Prof. Whitehead,

Thanks for the response. I published the paper before I joined the academic league and knew little about journal ratings and reputations. Upon reflection, I noticed that:

1. The paper is too good to be published in such journal (not barring opinions of the reviewers of the new targeted journal).

2. The journal does not have good reputation as I mentioned in the question.

In this case, can I still give it a try?

Thank you sir.

As a former journal editor of a reputable journal I'd like to say that it is not all about the author and their academic careers. It is also about the profession and the scholarly publishing industry.

Once a paper is submitted the paper immediately goes through a procedure, roughly as follows: 1). Initial checking by journal admin staff to ensure word length, etc., is adhered to/ initial plagiarism check; 2) initial read and review by the Senior Editor. If the paper is worthy on a quick inspection it is sent to two or more Associate Editors; 3) assessment by Associate Editors. If the paper is worthy of double blind review it is sent to at least 4-6 anonymous peer reviewers (many will decline to review if they are busy, therefore as an editor one usually over-compensates to ensure at least 3 independent peer reviews). 4) Then there is the process of peer review.

So within the first few days of submission, the intellectual effort of at least 7-9 people has been called upon. Deciding to "withdraw" a paper because a writer decides they do not like the journal is poor form indeed. It almost certainly means the editor will look askance at another submission by that author. Why did the writer submit it if they were not serious?

Withdrawing *after peer review has begun*, is dishonest, mean-spirited, and wasteful of the time and energies of: a) accomplished Editors; b) intelligent and ambitious Associate Editors, c) dedicated administrative staff; d) honourable peer reviewers who are performing a gratuitous labour of love for the discipline and profession.

Don't do it. Research your journal, choose an appropriate one, and then submit it and be prepared to follow the process to its conclusion.

Retracting a paper *once it has been accepted* is completely dishonourable, duplicitous and mean-spirited.

BTW: 1. Reputable journals are only suitable for reputable work. Not all academics produce reputable work, and their work is best suited to lower-tier journals. 2. Time spent publishing in lower tier journals is not wasted time. In the process, one learns to write better and, in time, one can produce papers worthy of reputable journals. 3. Publishing in a lower tier journal is better than being rejected by a "reputable" journal and not being published at all.

Martin, I will agree with what you said (especially with the BTW) with the following disclaimer: sometimes, it is good to look at the other side of the story.

And on this purpose, let's looks a bit at the author's perspective.

On average, it takes an author up to several months to write a decent article, susceptible to be sent to a good journal.

On the other hand, how long it takes a reviewer to review and write a decent appraisal of the article reviewed ? One day to read (I do not think that the average, 20-30 pages article needs more than a day for reading, otherwise the reviewer will have some difficulties to keep in touch with the literature in her field), maybe two if she re-reads, and perhaps two to three days to write? If you add the time of all the people involved in the editorial process, you won't get more than a month work time, much less than the time devoted by the author to write.

So, who dedicates more effort, and who invests more of her time in publishing? Is there any other answer than the author (who, of course, has also the major interest in publishing the respective article)?

Taking in consideration the above, I would be tempted to say that what you sensitively describes as the effort of the editor makes sense and this effort deserves the respect of authors and everybody else. The authors should be considered of the work of editors and do not waster anyone's time with trivial submissions. But the author's effort also deserves respect. While I would not say that trivial submissions should be encouraged, there may be instances when an author decision to withdraw after the time consuming and intensive editorial effort was initiated may not be condemned.

Perhaps that in order to correctly assess such disputable authorial practices, we should look at the ways in which the automation systems (in several fields you use such systems which deliver to multiple journals) dehumanized the whole process of journal publishing. And we should also look at the ways which the crazy pressures which the marketization of the universities with its associated processes of "metrics", "rankings", assessment exercises etc drove the authors to become some sort of "cheaters" of the "old good" system in which an author sent to a journal and editor whom he respected and was treated with respect and as a member of profession (I idealize a bit). Unfortunately, I believe that we live in a system where everybody cuts corners in order to survive "marketization" and the impersonality of the system.

Dear Liviu

I'm an author too of course. And there is no doubt that, on balance, the author spends more time working on the paper than the journal does assessing it (although if one aggregates the time over 7-9+ people, including copy-editors, typesetters, not to mention journal marketing experts, distributors, etc, -- for a journal is more than merely assessing content -- there is probably not much in it).

This is off-topic, but since you raised it: I'd like a dollar for every hour-after-grinding-hour of intellectual effort I've spent writing something -- only to have it rejected by a journal in a perfunctory manner in a matter of weeks/months. It hurts of course. I get angry, and demoralised, but in a few weeks I end up agreeing with the decision, picking my ego up from the floor and revising again, and sending it to another journal. (With practice and experience I have now got to a point where *everything* I write is published *somewhere*).

However, it's not a matter of time expended or time invested. That is, in a sense, irrelevent. It's a matter of the balance of responsibility. The author's responsibility is to argue the case that their work *is worth publishing*. It is the author's responsibility to argue that *THEIR* work should be selected from the deluge of material sent to a journal. The journal is not responsible for arguing that it is worthy of sending work to. Reputation for a journal comes from the quality of papers submitted and this is why reputable journals always reject more than they accept (95 percent are rejected in the case of very good journals). It's a buyers' market in other words -- and that's how it should be. If all academics published all the time (just because they spent a lot of time writing something), the dross being published would be unimaginable.

Complaining about the inequity of this situation is petulant. It is just the way it is. I'm not suggesting you are complaining about it, but your comments about the writer seems to suggest you think the situation is inequitable and that this needs redressing. I don't think it does. The system works well. By and large it publishes stuff worthy of being seen. (This is not to suggest that *everything* published is worthwhile. It isn't.)

Your comments about the marketisation of publishing is similarly misplaced. The academic publishing industry is what it is. I suspect neither of us like the "publish or perish" nature of academia, metrics, etc., but this is the nature of the system. It is also off the topic which is "should a writer be able to withdraw their paper"?

As an Editor I can say in all honesty that there is not much "automatisation" at all. There is a computer-based system for selecting reviewers, handling revisions, and so on, but this is absolutely essential to deal with the volumes of submissions Editors receive. An awful lot of rubbish is submitted. Much of it is illiterate. A lot of submissions are flagrantly plagiarised. I personally know of one academic, with whom I worked, who tried to publish the SAME article twice in two separate journals!

Most of the work done by a journal, and the people working for it, is done by people putting in long hours -- often for free -- to benefit the profession. To have an author decide to "jump ship" in the middle of the process is poor form as I explained. To use a boxing analogy: If an author does not want to fight, don't get in the ring!

Academic publishing is not a coterie of mutually supporting people slapping each others' backs to get ahead in their fields. It's a competition. Either you want to play to win or you don't.

It certainly happens that scholars publish their papers in journals which in retrospect were not the best choices, i.e. publishing high quality papers in lowly ranked journals.

My guess is that such "mistakes" are becoming more and more frequent with the constant barrage of e-mails from predatory OA journals which turn out to have a completely worthless scientific standing.

There is, of course, no way an author can "retract" an already published paper just because he/she wants to publish it elsewhere. What is done is done!

However, apart from missing the chance of publishing in a better journal, making such a mistake should not have any major consequences. Papers should be evaluated on their content, not in which journal they were published. If the paper has really advanced the state of the art, it will be cited, and the citation number is a much better measure of the quality of the paper than the IF of the journal it was published in.

I know a number of highly cited key papers which have been published in surprisingly low ranked journals.

Also, today, making the wrong journal choice does not mean that nobody finds and reads your paper, as could happen in the per-computer ere when we actually leafed through certain journals and read Current Contents to follow the literature. Now, computer searches will find a paper more or less irrespective of where it has been published.

I've just re-read the question and think I am off-topic. Apologies. The question was: Is it possible to recall or retract a paper * already published* in a journal? I read it as *submitted* to a journal.

If it is *already published* (i.e., out in print) I can't see how it can be withdrawn. It's out there. If it is *forthcoming* (i.e., accepted but not out yet), it is disrespectful to do so as I suggest, especially if one's reasons for withdrawing it is because the journal is not *reputable* enough for the writer.

If retraction is because of false data, or hitherto unforeseen problems with data collection or ethical approval/conflict of interest, then maybe. But these would be most unusual circumstances.

To retract a PUBLISHED article by itself is not a problem. But you have to give good reasons to do so, like misinterpretation in data, faults detected after submission etc. – be it true or not, cheating, sadly, is part of the business. Yet, by doing so YOU FOR SURE ANNIHILATE the article forever and your reputation might suffer as well. Btw. trying to come away with it is unfair and should not be encouraged. I therefore completely agree with Martin's comments.

P.S.: I can not understand, how it comes to such a situation at all. Assuming, the work really is worth to be published in one of the 'high-ranking' journals Then, enough brain must have been invested in crafting it. So, I am wondering how few brain was used submitting it when the submission is regretted there-after...

How can we claim to craft high-end research and be lured into a 'miss-submission' by "constant barrage of e-mails from predatory OA journals which turn out to have a completely worthless scientific standing". In which decade do we life?

Dear Martin,

What you sensitively described as the author’s experience is reflects well, I believe everyone’s experience as an author.

I also agree with the description of the editorial experience (I spend some time as a sort of national law reviews general editor for an important publisher…interesting enough, here is a seller-market, although the publishers pretend to be the other way around…it is hard to find good, original and interesting authors, and sometimes you have to do a lot of developmental editing, especially when the theme is interesting but the author lacks experience, etc…and I had to do this even if I am more of a substantive editor, and I could spent the least of time checking for the substance of the article) and especially with the description of what editors actually add in terms of value to their field.

Nevertheless, I believe that we should not assume that just because most of what editors get is worthless, and because the peer review model seems impersonal, the present process is necessary perfect, as it is. In the present process, (even in the peer review model) for minor drawbacks in their writings we loose original thinkers along the way (even if the strongest have the force to confirm in years that they were good). Sometimes we tend to publish “stars” just because their “stardom” status adds to the prestige of a journal, etc. It is like in football, substance has given sometimes to “spectacle” and we all tend to pay more to “stars” just because of the entertainment they are supposed to produce. And in my field, law, there is some “automation” (there is a major supplier of automatic submissions, at least in the US, and a less important, free one, provider), which generated a lot of talks among the editors specifically because the authors tent to go for the best ranking journals, make editors to start the reviewing process (it is also true that the peer review model is not necessary the dominant one, in the legal field), etc.

Certainly, I would agree with you that not all the fields are necessary so, and in your field the process is like you described. But on the other hand, I am more the cynical type who does not take assumptions easily, not least because I was trained as a lawyer, and because, living for a while under a “dictator” I got used to question all the assumptions, cultural, intellectual or other. After all, this is the Socratic tradition in the European culture.

So, while I agree that because people dedicated as you, academic publishing is not a “coterie of mutually supporting people” (frankly, in order to be a prodigious author, you need this mutually supporting environment, as writing, even the most creative one, is a collaborative process…and I am afraid that few universities could provide this sort of environment), I also doubt the system is perfectly fair as it is or that it could not be improved.

Of course, I think that my rants are mostly off topic, and that the initial question was well responded by other contributors

Thanks and regards.

In continuation of the question, if a journal is found to be a predatory publishing (where in initial phase was found to be good (based on website and responses)) after the manuscript has been sent. I wrote to the editor that I am withdrawing the manuscript, even after that the article is published. Now, should I forgo the research or fight to remove from their database?

After paper publication, this it is not possible.

No. after publish the paper not possible. If not publish you can withdraw the submission.

A good question and excellent responses here.

The reason behind retraction an article is that most scholars, especially in Middle East, are looking for academic promotion and if the journal turned to be a predatory one then the article is going to be neglected by the academic promotion board.

What about asking for withdrawal mean while the article is in process (before publication decision made), but the journal published it ignoring your request? Then making it online along with a retraction note as if the request was made after publication? That is what happened to the article i am an author for.