Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics

ocean_soul writes "It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics. The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the 'scientific' journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics, but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of them in the latest issue. Like many crackpots, El Nashie has a kind of cult around him, with another journal devoted to praising his greatness. There was also a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for El Naschie, which was supposedly written by one of his followers. When it was deleted by Wikipedia, they even threatened legal actions (which never materialized)."

Comments

How did he get the high impact factor?

[saforrest]

How did El Naschie game the system?

According to Elsevier, his impact factor is 3.025, which does seem high compared to Elsevier titles like Advances in Applied Mathematics (founded by Gian-Carlo Rota, who was a respectable mathematician).

It's clear from the samples that El Naschie's articles are complete garbage, and I'm sure no respectable mathematician would want to publish in what's effectively a crackpot's vanity press. This is obviously the scientific journal version of Googlebombing.

So how did he pull this off? Is he citing himself, and if so, where?

Re:How did he get the high impact factor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pick any of this recent papers and chances are good that most of the citations are to his own past papers. So, yes, that's how he's pulling it off: he cites himself ten times or so in each of his papers, and because he writes half the papers in each issue, that inflates the impact factor.

Re:EL Naschie Affair

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The Bogdanov affair is a little different. I did PhD research in theoretical physics but I was a bit unsure about the work of the Bogdanovs. There were bits of it that I could nitpick at and say it was definitely mistaken, but overall it was a little tricky to judge the bigger ideas without being a specialist in their particular subfield. The Bogdanovs had some smart people fooled. It's a very good hoax.

El Naschie's writing looks like nonsense even to non-specialists (though I guess you still need a degree in mathematics or physics). There's no way it could fool even beginners in the areas his work covers. That makes it all the more astonishing that he survived with Elsevier for so long. Apathy I guess.