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It is an open database aimed at compiling the most comprehensive list of publications that have been retracted or withdrawn, linked to their corresponding retraction notices from 2000 onward.

More than 120,000 records are publicly available to the scholarly community with the purpose of crea- ting an open infrastructure that promotes the study about research integrity and misconduct. Our commitment to Open Science principles leads us to consider necessary the development of a tool that aims to raise awareness about these publications to prevent improper use and citation.

About us

retractBASE is developed by the Joint Research Unit “Knowledge, Transfer and Innovation” shared by the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA) belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Córdoba (UCO). This project is led by José Luis Ortega (main researcher), Lorena Delgado Quirós (PhD researcher), Eva Becerra Rodero (PhD researcher), Adrián Garcia (web developer) and Celestino Moreno (web developer).

Funding

This project is funded by several research projects:

NEWSIS
SILICE

Methods

This database is supported on open bibliographic sources. Crossref and OpenAlex are used to search retracted publications, retraction notices and withdrawals. Public APIs of these platforms were used to Methods download the bibliographic records. The main novelties of this database are:

Publications and their retraction notices or withdrawals are connected to check the reasons for the retraction.

Each record provides web links to the original publication that verify the retraction.

It also gives identifiers from other external sources including PubMed, OpenAlex and Crossref to find more details about these publications.

We consider it important to link these publications with their comments in PubPeer to broaden the information about these papers. These comments have been categorized to classify the many types of publications’ problems. Learn more about this classification here.

We have designed several indicators to measure the impact of retractions by author, journal, organization and country.