RETRACTED: Pan et al. Physical and Thermal Studies of Carbon-Enriched Silicon Oxycarbide Synthesized from Floating Plants. Processes 2019, 7, 794

The journal retracts the article titled “Physical and Thermal Studies of Carbon-Enriched Silicon Oxycarbide Synthesized from Floating Plants” [1], cited above.

Following publication, concerns were brought to the attention of the Editorial Office regarding a potential undisclosed conflict of interest between the author and the Academic Editor supervising the peer review of this article [1].

Adhering to our complaint policy, an investigation was completed by the Editorial Office and Editorial Board, which confirmed a recent collaboration between an author and the Academic Editor that could be perceived as a conflict of interest and was judged to not align with MDPI’s conflict of interest policy relating to the handling of Special Issue submissions (https://www.mdpi.com/special_issues_guidelines). Consequently, the Editorial office and Editorial Board conducted a post-publication review of this article. This included an Editorial Board review of the entire editorial process, an assessment of the quality of the peer review, and an evaluation of the appropriateness of the final decision made on this publication. During this process, the Editorial Board identified several scientific concerns relating to the data presented in Table 1 and Figure 2–5. Despite multiple attempts by the journal to contact the corresponding authors for clarification, the corresponding authors have remained unresponsive. As a result, the Editorial Board has lost confidence in the reliability of the findings and decided to retract this publication [1], as per MDPI’s retraction policy (https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark30).

This retraction was approved by the Editor-in-Chief of Processes.

One of the authors agreed to this retraction, while the remaining authors have not provided their comment.