Fed up, author issues her own retraction after journal ghosts her
Bellut-Staeck, an independent researcher from Berlin, Germany, submitted a paper to SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine last spring after receiving an invitation from the journal. But when Bellut-Staeck realized her affiliation as listed on the article needed changing, she contacted the journal to request a correction. The problem, she said, was linguistic. Because she didn’t realize “affiliation” has a different meaning in German than English, she had mistakenly listed herself as being at an institution she has since left.
Receiving no response to three correction requests, she finally asked the journal to retract the paper. Frustrated when she still didn’t hear back, Bellut-Staeck said, she performed an “unilateral author-initiated retraction” on November 27, 2025. She documented the self-retraction on Figshare, writing she “unilaterally retracts” the article for “persistent non-responsiveness of the publisher for more than five weeks to repeated legitimate requests for correction of a critical affiliation error” and for “evidence of absence of meaningful peer review.”
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