/retractionwatch/notices

POST /api/retractionwatch/notices

Price: 10 credits

Get the Retraction Watch record for a paper by the DOI or PubMed ID of either the paper itself or the retraction, correction or expression-of-concern notice about it

How to use it

`reasons` is what Crossref cannot tell you; `nature` says whether this is a retraction, a correction, an expression of concern or a reinstatement, so do not read a result as a retraction without checking it. A paper may carry more than one record (an expression of concern followed by a retraction), so expect several rows. One notice DOI can also cover hundreds of papers at once — a blanket expression of concern — and only the first 50-100 come back (matched on both the notice side and the paper side, each walled at 50, then merged); pass that DOI to retractionwatch/notices/search with a journal, author or date range to reach the rest. Not every record carries a DOI or a PubMed ID at all; those are reachable only through retractionwatch/notices/search. The `record_id` is an output, not an input — there is no way to fetch a record by it.

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• doi string nullable — DOI of the retracted paper or of the notice about it (examples: "10.1038/s41586-025-09047-2", "10.1371/journal.pone.0346947")
• pubmed_id string nullable — PubMed ID of the retracted paper or of the notice about it (examples: "40468063")

Response

• @type string (default: "RetractionwatchNotice")
• record_id string required
• subjects array (default: [])
• journal string nullable
• publisher string nullable
• institutions array (default: [])
• authors array (default: [])
• countries array (default: [])
• article_types array (default: [])
• nature string nullable
• reasons array (default: [])
• original_paper_date string nullable
• original_paper_doi string nullable
• original_paper_pubmed_id string nullable
• retraction_date string nullable
• retraction_doi string nullable
• retraction_pubmed_id string nullable
• is_paywalled boolean nullable
• notes string nullable
• urls array (default: [])

Errors

• 422 — The request body did not validate Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — No Retraction Watch record for this identifier Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.