How to check if a paper has been retracted
Quick answer: find the paper's DOI and check it against Crossref, which records every retraction as a relation back to the original paper. Paste the DOI below and this tool does that lookup for you, in your own browser — or paste your whole reference list at once, since checking one paper is easy and checking the forty in a real bibliography, every time you revise, is the part nobody actually does.
Nothing here is uploaded or stored; the request goes from your browser straight to Crossref.
The three steps, in full
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1.
Find the DOI. It's on the paper's first page, its publisher landing page, or already sitting in the reference you copied it from — something like
10.1016/S0140-6736(97)11096-0. -
2.
Check it against Crossref. Crossref stores a retraction as a relation pointing from the retraction notice back to the original paper. Paste the DOI below, or open
doi.org/<the DOI>yourself and look for that relation on the record. -
3.
Read the result correctly. A title starting
RETRACTED:or a retraction relation in Crossref both count as confirmed. No notice found means Crossref holds none right now — the honest claim, not a permanent guarantee, since a notice can be deposited later.
Why this is not obvious from the paper itself
A retraction happens after you have downloaded the PDF. The copy in your folder, in your reference manager, and in the draft you are writing does not change — the publisher's page does. Nothing tells you, and nobody is checking on your behalf. In a study of one fraudulent clinical trial's retraction, 96% of the authors who cited it afterward showed no sign of knowing it had been retracted for falsified data[1].
What Crossref actually records
Retractions and corrections as a relation from the notice back to the original
paper, and publishers commonly prefix the title with
RETRACTED:
as well. Both are read here, and the notice's own DOI and date are shown so you can
go and read why.
Corrections are not retractions
They are reported separately here because they mean different things. A correction usually leaves the finding standing; a retraction withdraws it. Both are worth knowing about before submission, and neither is a reason to panic — a retracted source can still be cited deliberately, as long as you know that is what you are doing.
A few things people ask
Can I check just one paper, not a whole bibliography?
Yes. Paste a single DOI and press Check all — it works the same for one as for forty.
What if I only have the title, not the DOI?
This tool needs the DOI itself; it doesn't search by title. Most papers list it on the first page or the publisher's landing page, and pasting a full citation still works if a DOI is embedded somewhere in it.
Does this catch a withdrawn preprint?
No — this checks Crossref's retraction registry, which covers published journal articles. A withdrawn arXiv or other preprint uses a different mechanism (a version history, not a retraction relation); check the preprint server's own page for a withdrawal notice.
How current is this data?
As current as Crossref's own records, which depends on how quickly the publisher deposits the notice — often fast for major publishers, sometimes delayed for smaller ones. A clean result means no notice is in Crossref yet, not that none will ever appear.
[1] Schneider, J. et al. (2020). Continued post-retraction citation of a fraudulent clinical trial report. Scientometrics, 125, 2877–2913.
This checks retractions. A full audit also catches phantom DOIs, wrong years, mismatched journals and preprints that have since been published.
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