PsyPost, the psychology and neuroscience news website, has unveiled an automated Python programme designed to monitor its archive for studies that have been retracted, corrected, or flagged by publishers. In its first run against the databases Retraction Watch and Crossref, the programme scanned PsyPost’s archive of more than 16,000 articles and identified six studies that had been retracted. The system now runs on a consistent weekly schedule to answer one question: has any PsyPost-covered study been withdrawn or altered, and which articles are affected?
How the Programme Works
The audit process runs weekly in four steps to translate publisher data into a direct checklist for the editorial team.
Import: The programme scans PsyPost’s WordPress archive, identifies the scientific studies linked in each article and pulls the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for every study. Because publishers format links differently, the programme uses rules to locate DOIs whether they are clearly listed or embedded in publisher URLs for outlets such as SAGE, Wiley, Springer, Frontiers and PLOS. For sites that don’t display a DOI directly, such as Elsevier, PubMed or Nature, the programme uses lookup tools from Crossref and the National Center for Biotechnology Information to find the correct identifier. It currently monitors around 17,000 distinct scientific studies.
Check: The programme cross-references these DOIs against two primary sources. First, a local download of the Retraction Watch database—made freely available through Crossref since 2023—to identify retractions and their reason codes. Second, it queries Crossref’s publisher update logs to locate corrections and expressions of concern, which Retraction Watch doesn’t track comprehensively.
Triage: A raw check yields hundreds of records, many of which are administrative changes such as minor typo corrections, updated links or metadata glitches. The programme sorts these events, separating retractions and expressions of concern from minor corrections. It also filters by timing, separating notices that existed before PsyPost covered the study from those that arose after publication. The result is a concise table showing the affected study, the specific notice and the exact PsyPost article that needs updating.
Close: Once an editor reviews the alert, a notice is placed at the top of the affected PsyPost article explaining the retraction or correction to the reader. In the system, the event is marked as handled, and the next digest will only display new alerts.
Handling False Alarms
The programme is maintained and refined by human oversight. When the system returns a false positive—such as a publisher temporarily pulling and reinstating a paper due to a formatting error—a developer reviews the issue and writes a new rule in the code to ignore that specific class of administrative error in the future. By fixing the class of error rather than just the single instance, the tool produces fewer false alarms over time.
“Science is a self-correcting process, and when the status of a study changes, our articles need to reflect that,” said Eric W. Dolan, the founder and editor of PsyPost. “By regularly checking our archive against Crossref and Retraction Watch, this program allows us to systematically apply those corrections and provide our readers with an accurate reflection of the current scientific record.”
