Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as long as it is possible. However, very occasionally, circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like require retraction of an article. In exceptional cases a retraction may be demanded by authors.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Russian Psychological Journal. Before retraction the editors notify a corresponding author and explain the reasons behind it. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged; save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is ‘retracted’.