A public ledger for what got retracted.

The Xera Retraction Tracker is part of the open-source Xera.ac OpenScience platform — a small set of tools for making the integrity infrastructure of science legible and queryable. It started in 2020 as CitingRetracted, a single-script tool that joined the Retraction Watch spreadsheet to OpenAlex citation counts. It now ingests citation data from multiple sources, runs nightly, and exposes everything it knows through this UI and a public API.

How we count

A retracted paper’s citations are pulled from openalex.org, api.opencitations.net, and api.semanticscholar.org, deduplicated by DOI then by title+author+year. A citation’s “days after retraction” is the difference between its publication date and the retraction notice date — same-day citations are flagged separately.

Maintainer

Citing this database

@misc{xera_retractions_2025,
  author = {Sofi-Mahmudi, Ahmad},
  title  = {Xera Retraction Tracker},
  year   = {2025},
  url    = {https://openscience.xera.ac/retractions},
  note   = {Database, accessed YYYY-MM-DD}
}