Tag Archives: libkey

LibKey Now Flags Both First and Second Order Retractions

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Over the last decade, many in the scholarly research community have been sounding the alarm about journal article retractions being on the rise, for example:

Most prominent of these voices has been Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the Retraction Watch Database:

Thanks to an increase in awareness of this issue, new technologies have been developed to help alert library discovery tool users whenever they come across retracted items while searching. The thinking is that researchers should have the opportunity to closely examine retracted publications – and even publications that cite retracted papers but are not retracted themselves – as the research being reported within them may be compromised in some way.

One such tool, LibKey, that MSK community members can use via the library’s OneSearch catalog, flags retracted article citations whenever they appear in search result lists – see:

Starting in Summer 2025, LibKey expanded its retraction notification capabilities to also include “data about articles which cite one or more retracted articles”.

As per the LibKey (Third Iron) vendor’s newsletter:

“If a paper cites one or more retracted articles, LibKey will display an interstitial screen indicating which citations have been retracted”. 

For example – see:

If you have any questions or want additional guidance related to retractions, checkout “About Article Retractions” or feel free to Ask Us at the MSK Library.

Retracted Article Alerts Incorporated into LibKey Products, Including ONESEARCH

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According to the co-founder of the Retraction Watch Database, Ivan Oransky, “Retraction Watch has witnessed a retraction boom since its founding 12 years ago”. This rise in retracted articles has translated into an increased risk of scholarly authors inadvertently citing a retracted paper without realizing it.

To mitigate this risk, a variety of library tools have started incorporating functionality that notifies their users whenever they come across an article that has been signposted as a retraction. To keep things as seamless as possible, these tools are not requiring their users to pause their research and jump to a second library product to look something up, but rather are incorporating these retraction flags/alerts as a safety “speed bump” in their process.

For example, Third Iron’s LibKey products like the MSK Library’s ONESEARCH discovery tool has begun including retraction status flags and reasons to help searchers make better informed decisions just as they are about to access the full-text PDF format of articles.

Here’s what it look like in practice – take, for example, this PubMed-indexed retracted article:

Hassan M, Watari H, AbuAlmaaty A, Ohba Y, Sakuragi N. Apoptosis and molecular targeting therapy in cancer. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:150845. doi: 10.1155/2014/150845. Epub 2014 Jun 12. Retraction in: Biomed Res Int. 2020 Aug 28;2020:2451249. PMID: 25013758; PMCID: PMC4075070.

The database citation record gets similarly flagged as a Retracted Article in ONESEARCH:

However, the retracted status becomes most obvious to the user at the critical point when they are about to decide whether or not they should invest time reading the full-text article:

Learn more About Article Retractions in Third Iron products or Ask Us at the MSK Library.