Sentry
Reference Integrity Checker
Paste your bibliography. We resolve every reference via Crossref and check each one against Retraction Watch, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the DOAJ-withdrawn log to flag retractions, expressions of concern, and integrity-flagged venues before reviewers do.
We don’t train AI on your data. Bibliography text is deleted within 24 hours.
Paste any format
DOIs (one per line), BibTeX, RIS, or plain-text references · auto-detected.
We resolve every entry
Crossref polite pool fetches metadata; Retraction Watch fast-path catches retractions.
Per-reference cards
Color-coded badges (retracted / EoC / correction / hijacked / DOAJ-withdrawn / clean) with notice DOIs.
Why reference integrity matters
The Retraction Watch database tracks over 50,000 retracted papers. Studies sampling published manuscripts find that roughly 1 in 200 references in active citation flow is a paper that has been retracted, and a paper continues to be cited an average of ~10 more times after retraction. Reviewers and journal staff increasingly screen reference lists against these databases at submission; a retracted citation discovered after publication can trigger a correction or retraction of your own paper.
Sentry runs the same checks reviewers do, in the pre-submission window, so a fixable citation never becomes a downstream correction notice.
Limitations
- DOI-keyed verification. V1 verifies via DOI. References without a DOI surface as “unverifiable” rather than guessed at. Title/author PubMed fallback ships in a future update.
- Crossref-registered DOIs. Some publishers use non-Crossref registrars (e.g., DataCite for some preprints, mEDRA, KISTI). DOIs from those registrars surface as “DOI did not resolve” · not as a clean pass and not as a flag.
- Retraction propagation lag. Retraction notices typically appear in Crossref within 24-72 hours of publication. Very fresh retractions may not be caught yet; we mirror Retraction Watch’s curated list nightly to fast-path known cases regardless of Crossref ingest time.
- Hijacked-journal name match is conservative. ISSN match is reliable; pure name match runs against the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker tracker. We do not flag based on title-similarity heuristics, only exact matches.
- 200-reference cap. V1 processes the first 200 references per check. For full-bibliography sweeps on book-length manuscripts, run multiple checks or use the manuscript-level readiness scan.
Manuscript-level read
Want every claim verified, not just every reference?
Sentry catches retracted citations. The full Manusights Readiness Scan reads your entire manuscript and verifies whether each citation actually supports the claim it’s attached to · alongside methods, statistics, journal fit, and reviewer-flag patterns. Free preview, $29 only if you want the full report.
Built with reviewers who have published in Cell, Nature, The Lancet, NEJM, and Science. Used by researchers at every institution below.
Want the data sources behind every flag? Read the full methodology · Crossref polite-pool details, Retraction Watch / DOAJ / hijacked-journals data sources, update cadence, and known limitations. Or read About + credits for attribution to the original data providers.
Checking citation claims, not just references? Run Manusights Verify · paste a sentence with a citation, get a verdict on whether the cited paper actually supports the claim.
Sanity-checking your Results section too? Run Manusights Audit · paste your stats prose, get instant flags for inconsistent p-values (statcheck), impossible means (GRIM), and decision-flipping rounding errors before reviewers do.