Citing retracted work is a worse error than citing a paper that never existed.
A retracted paper was published, indexed, and cited before the journal withdrew it. It stays in your PDF folder, in your reference manager, and in the reference lists of everything that cited it earlier. Nothing tells you it changed status. Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper was retracted in 2010 and was still cited more than 90 times in 2024.
The error is worse than a fabricated citation for one reason: a reader who knows the field will recognize the paper and know what happened to it. A fabrication looks like carelessness; citing a retracted study as support looks like you did not follow the literature.
https://api.crossref.org/works/<DOI> and look at the
updated-by field. An entry of type retraction gives you the notice DOI and
the date it was issued.is_retracted flag on the
work record, which is quicker to read and covers some cases CrossRef misses.Two related statuses matter and are easy to miss. An expression of concern means the journal has published doubts without withdrawing the paper; the work still stands, but a reader who checks will find the notice. A correction can be trivial or can change the result you relied on. CrossRef files both in the retraction field, under different types.
Remove it, and check whether the claim it supported survives without it. If the claim depends on that paper alone, the claim goes too. There is one legitimate use: citing a retracted work to discuss the retraction, in which case say so explicitly in the text so no reader has to wonder.
The shortcut: paste your bibliography into CiteFact and every entry is checked against CrossRef and OpenAlex at once, retractions included. Free for 10 references, no signup.
Verdicts come from two sources and nothing else: CrossRef, the DOI registration agency for most scholarly publishers, and OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works. Retraction status comes from the Retraction Watch database, which CrossRef has distributed since 2023. We run no language model anywhere in the checking path. One reference checked twice returns one verdict, and every verdict traces to a record you can open yourself. A reference we cannot find is reported as unverifiable when it belongs to a category those registries do not index, and as not found only when it is the kind of work they would normally index. The checker applies this method to a whole bibliography at once.
This page and the checker behind it are a self-service first pass. They query two open registries, which leaves real gaps: consultancy and agency reports, non-English scholarship, dissertations, conference proceedings outside the major series, and anything published before those registries have coverage. A subject librarian and your institution's licensed databases index all of it, and can confirm the items we can only mark "unverifiable." If a reference matters to your argument and this page cannot settle it, that is the next stop.
CiteFact. "How to check whether a paper has been retracted." citefact.com/retraction-check. Reviewed September 2026.
Permanent link https://citefact.com/retraction-check
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See also: how to check whether a citation is real · how to tell a fabricated DOI from a real one