This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier policy on article withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/article-withdrawal).
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor.
Post-publication, an investigation conducted on behalf of the journal by Elsevier's Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics team discovered suspicious author affiliations/areas of research that do not appear to reflect the subject area of this article. Furthermore, the investigation identified references that are irrelevant to the article. The investigation also found that the authors plagiarized papers that had already appeared in World Dev. Sustain. Vol (1), 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wds.2022.100019), Mid. East. Finance Econ. Issue 3, 2009 (no DOI, https://www.scribd.com/document/39467072/Relationship-Between-Stock-Prices-Exchange-Rate-and-Demand-for-Money-in-Pakistan), Energ. Rep. vol 7, 2021, pp.4642-4658 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2021.07.020), Energy. Strat. Rev. vol 30, 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2020.100488), Econ. Ther. Vol 13, 1997 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266466600006290), Resour. Pol. Vol 94, 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2024.105145), and Resour. Pol. Vol 96, 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2024.105096). One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system.
The Editor reached out to the authors for an explanation and evidence of their contributions to the study, and also asked them to comment on the presence of irrelevant references in their work, but they were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation. The Editor has determined that the authorship and the findings and integrity of the article cannot be relied upon and has decided to retract the article. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.
The authors disagree with retraction and dispute the grounds for it.