This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier policy on article withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/article-withdrawal).
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor.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 substantial changes in authorship during the submission process of this paper. During revision, 5 authors were added to the author list without adequate explanation. Additionally, one author was removed during revision.
The investigation sought to determine if ethics approval was provided for the research presented in this publication, in line with the journals policy. The authors stated that ethics approval was not required, however, the investigation was unable to verify if this was the case.
The investigation also found that the authors plagiarised and paraphrased sections of a paper that had already appeared in Int. J. of Contemp. Hosp. Manag, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 267-287. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-03-2019-0244 and J Bus Ethics 108, 525536(2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1108-2. 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 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 state that this overlap was unintentional.
During the investigation, the authors shared the dataset at the request of the Editor. On examination, discrepancies between the dataset provided and the published paper were detected. This included missing data for six of the sample, and presence of additional variables which were not reported in the paper. The Editor reached out to the authors for an explanation, who reported incomplete data had been shared previously, due to data cleaning. The authors reported the additional variables were removed due to statistical insignificance (variable PE9), and due to merging of items and subsequent removal from the questionnaire during pilot testing due to low reliability (variable PE10). The Editor has concerns with the integrity and transparency of the explanation and reporting in the article.
Furthermore, the Editor does not have confidence that all of the stated authors of the article qualify for authorship, and it cannot be established whether the article complies with the journal's policies on ethics; thus, the Editor has lost confidence in the validity and integrity of the article and made the decision to retract.
The authors disagree with the retraction and dispute the grounds for it.