Available for beta testing: Retracted paper notifications

In the latest beta, Zotero will automatically check your database for retracted papers and notify you if it finds any matches. We're providing this service in partnership with Retraction Watch, and we're proud to help sustain their important work.

Retracted papers are flagged in the items list, and if you click on one you'll see a warning at the top of the item pane with details on the retraction and links to additional information. If you try to cite a retracted paper using the word processor plugin, Zotero will warn you and confirm that you still want to cite the paper.

The retraction data is stored on our servers, but it was important to us that this feature could be used by people who don't sync their data to Zotero servers without needing to actually share the contents of their libraries. We'll provide more details in our official announcement, but basically, we've implemented this in a way that prevents us from knowing what specific items you have in your library. (And, of course, we're not logging the contents of lookups anyway.)

Currently, this feature is limited to items with a DOI or PMID (entered in the DOI field or in Extra as "DOI:", "PMID:", or "PubMed ID:"), which covers about 3/4 of Retraction Watch data, but we're going to try to support items without identifiers as best as possible in a future update. (We'll also be adding long-awaited additional Zotero fields and field mappings in the near future, at which point DOIs and PMIDs from Extra will be automatically migrated to available fields.)
  • This is amazing! Looking forward to testing it.
  • edited June 7, 2019
    The DOI-based lookup doesn't work if a shortDOI is stored in the DOI field, so this feature won't work for a lot of users of the DOI Manager plugin.

    Can that be accommodated? Perhaps as an alternative to just-in-time lookup of the long DOI, a separate shortDOI field could be added in the field update, which gets exported to CSL DOI versus the DOI field if present?

    Another option would be to add the shortDOI alongside the DOI to the lookup database, but a separate shortDOI field would smooth out wrinkles with other services as well, such as Unpaywall.
  • Great work! I see that things are working as you described them. Some considerations:

    1. If I try to cite a retracted paper in Word, then I will see the warning where the last sentence indicates that I can view the item in my library, but the only buttons are Continue and Cancel. Is the View button missing?

    2. After the upgrade I saw the warning about retracted items in my library. However, when I skipped that and clicked somewhere else, then I cannot continue to see the retracted papers again.

    3. I only see the first retracted item and I don't see an options to go through all of them or to the "next" one.

    Would maybe a special collection like the duplicates or items without a collection make sense here as well? Or is it possible to search for retracted items?
  • A special collection like Duplicates would be great.
  • The DOI-based lookup doesn't work if a shortDOI is stored in the DOI field, so this feature won't work for a lot of users of the DOI Manager plugin.
    Oh, so if you're overwriting the existing DOI, anything that uses the DOI for identification won't work without retrieving the full DOI. Currently that'd affect Unpaywall and this, but it will likely be other things in the future. It should probably be in a separate field — the shortDOI makes sense for citing, but the full DOI is pretty important for identification. If you want, we can add in substitution of "ShortDOI:" from Extra now when passing the data to CSL and you can start storing them in there. (We can discuss this elsewhere, but with a separate field, we could consider just integrating shortDOI resolution, at least as an option.)
    the only buttons are Continue and Cancel. Is the View button missing?
    Yes, that's on my to-do list.
    Would maybe a special collection like the duplicates or items without a collection make sense here as well? Or is it possible to search for retracted items?
    Yes, we're planning exactly that. (I was holding off because the collections tree is being rewritten in React and I was hoping not to implement the special collection twice, but I may just do it so we can launch this properly.)
  • @dstillman Should I open an issue on GitHub to discuss incorporating DOI Manager’s functions?
  • That'd be great.
  • Can I be included in the discussion? DOI handling also impacts BBT.
  • awesome function !
  • In the latest beta I've implemented both of the above-mentioned changes: 1) a "Show Item in Library" button in the warning dialog when citing and 2) a Retracted Items virtual collection that appears automatically when new retracted items are detected, and which the top banner now links to.
  • In the latest beta, the word processor plugin will also warn you if there any existing citations in your document that have been retracted, even if the item no longer exists in your database or was added to the document by someone else from their own library.
  • edited June 14, 2019
    This feature is now available in Zotero 5.0.67. Thanks for the feedback!
This discussion has been closed.