  The proliferation of scholarly publications underscores the necessity for
reliable tools to navigate scientific literature. OpenAlex, an emerging
platform amalgamating data from diverse academic sources, holds promise in
meeting these evolving demands. Nonetheless, our investigation uncovered a flaw
in OpenAlex's portrayal of publication status, particularly concerning
retractions. Despite accurate metadata sourced from Crossref database, OpenAlex
consolidated this information into a single boolean field, "is_retracted,"
leading to misclassifications of papers. This challenge not only impacts
OpenAlex users but also extends to users of other academic resources
integrating the OpenAlex API. The issue affects data provided by OpenAlex in
the period between 22 Dec 2023 and 19 Mar 2024. Anyone using data from this
period should urgently check it and replace it if necessary.
