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 Wakefield's 1998 Lancet paper was retracted in 2010 and still collects hundreds of citations a year.
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 reports both in the field that carries retractions, 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 itself, 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.
See also: how to check whether a citation is real · how to tell a fabricated DOI from a real one