RETRACTED: The size effect of oxygen impurities on the hardness of Ti–Si–N coatings

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).Reason: the authors have plagiarized results, figures and data that have already appeared in the papers referenced below. 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 we apologize to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.The publishers have been asked by the corresponding author of the retracted paper to record the fact that the third listed author (Prof. Xu Kewei) was not informed by the other authors that the paper had been submitted.[1] S. Veprek, P. Nesladek, A. Niederhofer, F. Glatz, M. Jilek, M. Sima, Surf. Coat. Technol. 108–109 (1998) 138; [2] S. Veprek, H.-D. Männling, A. Niederhofer, D. Ma, S. Mukherjee, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 22 (2004) L5; [3] S. Veprek, P. Karvankova, M.G.J. Veprek-Heijman, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 23 (2005) L17; [4] S. Veprek, H.-D. Männling, P. Karvankova, J. Prochazka, Surf. Coat. Technol. 200 (2006) 3876; [5] S. Veprek, M.G.J. Veprek-Heijman, P. Karvankova, J. Prochazka, Thin Solid Films 476 (2005) 1; [6] S. Veprek, A. . Argon, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 20 (2002) 650.