Taylor & Francis Tells Authors a Retraction Is Not a Punishment, in the Policy Itself

Taylor & Francis’s page is notable for saying something most of the other publishers in this set leave implicit: that a retraction is a record-keeping act, not a sanction.

Correction. Used when an error or omission may affect interpretation, but the findings’ integrity is intact. “Major errors are always accompanied by a separate correction notice”; a minor error gets only a footnote stating the article was corrected and updated. The corresponding author must get consensus among all co-authors before the journal’s editorial team, with Taylor & Francis staff support, decides. Requests involving new or repeated experiments are generally not considered as corrections.

Expression of Concern (EoC). Used for serious concerns, such as possible misconduct, where the outcome is inconclusive or an investigation will take a long time. A separate “final notice” variant covers outstanding concerns about part of a work that do not affect its overall integrity. An EoC is linked to the article and may later be followed by a correction or a retraction.

Retraction. Used when a major error invalidates the article’s conclusions, or when misconduct appears to have occurred — fabricated data, image manipulation, or plagiarism are named examples. The decision follows a full investigation by Taylor & Francis editorial staff working with the journal’s editorial team, and “Retractions are issued to correct the scholarly record and should not be interpreted as punishments for the authors” — a framing statement built into the policy itself rather than left for authors to infer. Authors and institutions may both request a retraction. The published article gets a “retracted” watermark and a separate statement titled “Retraction: [article title]”.

Removal (rare). Reserved for cases where neither a correction nor a retraction can address the problem — content posing a serious risk of harm, a privacy violation, or a court order.

Stating explicitly that a retraction is not a punishment is a deliberate piece of framing, and it matters because the social cost of a retraction on a researcher’s career is often disproportionate to its actual cause — an honest statistical error can carry the same stigma in casual conversation as deliberate fabrication, even though the policy treats them as different triggers for the same mechanical fix to the record.

Requiring co-author consensus before a correction, rather than letting the corresponding author act alone, protects every named author’s interest in what gets published about their own work — and it also means a correction can be slower to arrange than the underlying error might suggest, which is worth planning for.

Letting institutions request a retraction, not only authors, reflects how integrity concerns actually surface in practice: an institutional research-integrity office investigating a researcher often reaches a conclusion the individual author would not have brought to the publisher themselves.

How it reaches a specific journal. Taylor & Francis editorial staff work jointly with each journal’s own editorial team on retraction investigations, which keeps the standard consistent across the portfolio while still involving the people closest to the manuscript’s subject area.

For a correction specifically, the practical bottleneck is usually not the publisher but reaching every co-author for consensus — worth starting early if an error has been found, rather than waiting until the correction request is otherwise ready.