About Manusights Sentry

Sentry is an integration layer, not a data source. The actual retraction notices, hijacked-journal records, DOAJ status, 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 entry comes from the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Every DOAJ-withdrawn flag comes from DOAJ’s public change log. Sentry’s contribution is the integration:

Single paste-and-go flow for any input format (DOIs, BibTeX, RIS, plain text)
All four checks (retraction, hijacked, DOAJ-withdrawn, expression-of-concern) in one pass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 journal titles being impersonated by predatory websites mimicking legitimate venues. Sentry mirrors this list nightly and uses it to flag references where the journal name or ISSN matches a known hijacked title.

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 public log of journals that have been removed for not meeting those criteria over time. Sentry uses DOAJ’s withdrawn-journals log to flag references in venues that were removed for misconduct, predatory practices, or other editorial-integrity reasons.

Reference: https://doaj.org

Open-source library credits

citation-js by Lars Willighagen — the BibTeX/RIS parsing layer. citation.js.org
doi-regex by Sindre Sorhus — the DOI extraction regex used for plaintext sweeps. github.com/sindresorhus/doi-regex

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 $29 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.