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About Manusights Sentry

Sentry is an integration layer, not a data source. The actual retraction notices, hijacked-journal records, and DOI metadata all come from public datasets maintained by independent organizations. This page credits them.

What Sentry adds, and what it doesn’t

Every retraction Sentry surfaces was first identified, curated, and published by Retraction Watch or registered as a Crossref update notice by the publishing journal. Every hijacked-journal clone domain comes from the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Sentry’s contribution is the integration:

  • Single paste-and-go flow for any input format (DOIs, BibTeX, RIS, plain text)
  • All three checks (retraction, hijacked-journal, expression-of-concern) in one pass
  • No login, no email gate, no install · librarians can link from LibGuides without sending users through a paywall
  • 24-hour shareable URL per result (re-run the bibliography to refresh the link for LibGuide use)
  • Plain-English per-flag explanations that name the data source

Crossref

The DOI registry that powers everything

Crossref is a not-for-profit member organization that runs the largest DOI registry for academic content (~150 million records). Sentry uses Crossref’s REST API for every per-DOI lookup — metadata, container-title, ISSN, and the update-to[] array that links each retracted paper to its retraction notice. Crossref also hosts the Retraction Watch dataset mirror via Crossref Labs.

Reference: https://www.crossref.org

Retraction Watch

ISSN 2692-4579 · The retraction database

Retraction Watch is operated by The Center for Scientific Integrity, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus in 2010. Its database tracks more than 50,000 retracted papers across every academic field, with curated reason categories drawn from the published retraction notices. The dataset is freely available via Crossref Labs.

Sentry would not exist without Retraction Watch’s curatorial work. If you cite Sentry in your manuscript, please also cite the Retraction Watch Database directly (ISSN 2692-4579).

Reference: The Retraction Watch Database

Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker

Public tracker of journal title impersonation

The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker is a public Google Sheet maintained by the Retraction Watch team that catalogues journals being impersonated by predatory clone websites mimicking legitimate venues. Sentry mirrors the clone domains from this list and flags a reference only when it cites a known clone domain — never on journal name or ISSN, which hijacked clones copy verbatim from the real journal (matching on those would falsely flag legitimate references).

Reference: Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker

DOAJ

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is an independent, community-curated index of open-access journals, with editorial criteria for inclusion and a record of journals removed for not meeting those criteria over time. DOAJ-withdrawn screening is not currently active in Sentry: DOAJ does not publish a reliable machine-readable withdrawn feed, so rather than ship an unreliable check we have held it back until a dependable source is available.

Reference: https://doaj.org

Open-source library credits

Acknowledgements

Sentry’s design draws on prior work by Aaron Tay (Singapore Management University), whose comparison reviews of retraction-checking tools are the canonical reference for librarians evaluating this category, and on the broader research-integrity community whose advocacy made retraction data a public good. We are also grateful to the Citation Integrity and Retraction Watch communities for keeping post-publication accountability accessible.

If you maintain a dataset Sentry uses and feel the credit on this page is incomplete or inaccurate, please email us and we will fix it within 24 hours.

About Manusights

Manusights is a manuscript-readiness platform for researchers preparing papers for submission. Sentry is one of three free tools we offer; the others are Compass (journal fit predictor), Verify (citation claim checker), and Audit (stats sanity checker).

Our paid product is a $39 manuscript readiness scan that runs the full citation-integrity suite alongside methodology, statistics, novelty, and journal-fit checks against your entire manuscript. The free preview is unlocked without payment.