This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor.
An investigation conducted on behalf of the journal by Elsevier's Research Integrity & Publishing Ethics team identified references that are irrelevant to the article. The authors were asked to comment upon the presence of these references in their work but were unable to satisfactorily address the reason for the references.
Additionally the investigation determined that the authors were requested by one of the reviewers to insert redundant references to their papers during the peer-review process.
Consequently, the editor no longer has confidence in the integrity and the findings of the article and has decided to retract it. 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 the retraction and dispute the grounds for it.