Manuscript: Withdrawal with a valid justification, the corresponding author may seek withdrawal of the paper after submission (but before acceptance). Requests for withdrawal made prior to the start of the peer-review process—typically within five days after submission—will be taken into consideration right away, without needing an explanation.

However, the author may withdraw the article at any point after the review process begins by providing a legitimate ethical justification. We may take appropriate ethical action if any unethical reason for the manuscript's withdrawal is discovered (even after it has been totally withdrawn). Before submitting, the author of the work should think about all ethical issues (permission from co-authors, institutional/funder policy, simultaneous submission, plagiarism, duplicate submission, etc.)

1. After withdrawal: Withdrawn manuscripts will not be accepted for publication as galleys or early versions of the accepted text. The enormous amount of work and priceless resources that the editors, reviewers, and editorial board have put in may be wasted in this way. Manuscripts that have been accepted for publication will be handled appropriately if they contain scientific errors, are found to be an accidental duplicate of another published article or articles, or are found to be in violation of our publishing ethics guidelines. Examples of such violations include multiple submission, false authorship claims, plagiarism, reviewer bias, fraudulent data use, or research misconduct.
2. Post publication: Published articles will be exact, unaltered and unmodified. However, there can be moral dilemmas if an article that has already been published is later changed, withdrawn, substituted, or even eliminated. These kinds of activities are extremely rare and should only be considered in extreme cases. We think that worldwide standards are necessary for these problems, and as these standards develop and change over time, we will implement international standards in addition to suggested best practices. An Addendum, Duplication, Erratum, Corrigendum, Retraction, Replacement, or Removal are examples of post-publication withdrawals.
3. Article Retraction: Retractions are sometimes used to address violations of publication ethics, including the use of fictitious data, dishonesty in research, duplicate submissions, plagiarism, etc. Only after thoroughly reviewing the matter and consulting with experts in the field can an article be retracted by its writers or editor. The scholarly community's standard guidelines (COPE, ICMJE) for handling retractions has led to the adoption of the best practice for retraction by AJHS.

Only in cases where research integrity is questioned (duplicate publication, plagiarism, biased or phony review of fake data, fraudulent results), will a case be reviewed under the retraction policy. Retraction will not be applied to any other wrongdoing (author disagreement, funding policy/institution, simultaneous submission, etc.) that does not compromise the research integrity of the paper.

Retraction cases will only be taken into consideration in compliance with COPE guidelines if, following a thorough inquiry, severe article integrity is found and cannot be addressed by a corrigendum. The paginated portion of a later edition of the journal will have a retraction note headed "Retraction: [­article title]" that will be mentioned in the contents list. A link to the original article and the retraction decision will be included in the retraction note. The initial article (in PDF format) will be kept unaltered, with a "Retracted" watermark appended to each page. The article's retraction status and a link to the retraction notice will be updated in the cross-reference data.