Is the paper I cited retracted? How to check

Paste the DOI or the exact title into the Retraction Watch Database. It is free, needs no account, and answers the question in about ten seconds. If the paper appears there, open the notice and read it before you do anything, because what the notice says changes what you should do next.

The rest of this page is the practical procedure: where else to look when the database comes back empty, how to tell a retraction from the two things people confuse it with, and what to do when a source you have already cited turns out to have been pulled.

The three-place check

One place is usually enough. Three makes it certain, and each catches something the others miss.

1. The Retraction Watch Database

Search by DOI or by title at retractiondatabase.org. The search page has two boxes: use "Original Paper" for the article you are citing, and "Retraction or Other Notices" if you are looking for a notice you already know about. The user guide covers the other fields, including author, journal and PMID. You have to fill in at least one field, so a completely blank search will not work.

Crossref acquired the database from the Center for Scientific Integrity in September 2023 and made the data publicly available, updated daily and downloadable as a CSV. That is why reference managers can now check it automatically, which is the last section of this page.

2. The article's own page

Resolve the DOI and look at the publisher's landing page for the article. A retracted paper normally carries a banner across the top, a "RETRACTED" prefix on the title, or a linked notice. Many publishers also show a Crossmark button, which reports whether Crossref holds a record of an update, correction or retraction for that DOI. This is the check that catches very recent retractions before third-party databases pick them up.

3. PubMed, for medical and life sciences

Find the record in PubMed and look at its publication types. Two labels matter: "Retracted Publication" is applied to the paper itself, and "Retraction of Publication" marks the notice. You can also filter a whole result set by article type. The MD Anderson research library has a short walkthrough if you want the exact clicks.

Why your PDF said nothing

Because the file on your laptop is a snapshot and the notice attaches to the version of record. A copy downloaded eight months ago will never tell you anything changed. Worse, labelling is inconsistent even on live pages: a study of how retracted status is displayed found that across publisher sites and bibliographic databases, a large share of records for retracted articles gave no indication of the retraction at all. Check the live page, not your download, and do not assume silence means clean.

Retraction, expression of concern, correction

Three different notices, routinely mixed up, and only one of them means stop citing this.

Correction (also erratum or corrigendum). A specific error is fixed and the findings still stand. Cite the paper normally. If the correction touches the exact number or figure you are relying on, use the corrected value.

Expression of concern. The editors are telling readers about a credible problem that has not been resolved, often while an investigation runs. It is not a retraction and it is not a clearance. Treat the finding as unsettled: either avoid resting an argument on it, or cite it and note the concern. Expressions of concern are frequently superseded later by either a correction or a retraction, so check the date and look for anything more recent.

Retraction. The work should no longer be relied on. The article stays online, marked, because the record is not erased. COPE's retraction guidelines set out when journals should retract and what a notice must contain. The 2025 update added categories including retraction with replacement, for serious errors that change the findings without invalidating the underlying scholarship, and retraction with removal for rare legal or public-health cases.

Reading the notice

Open it. It is usually one paragraph and it tells you four things worth knowing.

• Who issued it. The authors, the editors, the publisher, or some combination. An author-initiated retraction after finding their own error is a different story from an editorial retraction following an investigation.
• The grounds. Honest error, unreliable data, image manipulation, plagiarism, unverifiable authorship, ethics approval problems. COPE's guidance covers retraction for honest mistakes as well as for misconduct, so a retraction is not automatically an accusation.
• The scope. Some notices retract a specific finding or figure while noting the rest holds. Read carefully before you assume everything in the paper is void.
• The date. This determines whether the paper was already retracted when you cited it, which is the fact that shapes the conversation if anyone asks.

Some notices are vague to the point of uselessness. That is a known problem in the literature and not something you can fix. When the notice says nothing, treat the paper as unusable for evidence and move on.

What to do about it

Before you submit. Remove it and re-support the claim from a source that stands. Do not just swap in the nearest paper on the topic: check that the replacement actually says what your sentence claims, which is a separate test from whether it is sound. If nothing supports the claim any more, that is worth knowing, and the search-and-rewrite procedure covers what to do next.

After you submit, before it is marked. Email your instructor. One short message: the reference has been retracted, here is the notice, here is the corrected version if you are allowed to provide one. Getting there first is always better than being told.

If the retraction post-dates your submission. This is a normal hazard of writing about live research and no one reasonable will hold it against you. Say when you cited it and when the notice appeared. The dates do the work.

If you are writing about the retraction itself. Cite it explicitly as retracted, with the notice alongside. Discussing a withdrawn paper as a case is legitimate; presenting its findings as current evidence is not.

One extra step worth taking: check the rest of the list. Papers cluster, and a retracted source is often cited alongside others from the same group or the same problematic literature.

Making it automatic

If you use Zotero, retraction checking is built in. It checks your library against Retraction Watch data, flags retracted items in the item list, and warns you when you next update citations in a document that cites one. Setting that up once removes this task from your life permanently. Other reference managers have added similar features, and the underlying data is openly published by Crossref if you want to check a long list programmatically.

Where this fits into checking a reference at all: retraction status is the last of several questions, after whether the paper exists and whether the details are right. Our guide to verifying a citation is the full routine, and how to tell if a journal article is fake covers a related question this check does not answer, which is whether the venue was legitimate in the first place. A retraction database only knows about papers a journal cared enough to withdraw, which is one more reason to prefer sources from venues that behave like this in the first place.