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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)."
In fact, the crackpotness of El Nachies' papers is obvious even to most grad students (you should read some, they are in fact rather funny). The bigger problem is that, by repeatedly citing his own articles, his journal gets a high impact factor. People who have absolutely no clue about math, like the ones who decide on the funding, conclude from the high impact factor that the papers in this journal must be of high quality.
Oh, snap!
Seriously? There's a lot of high-quality CS research out there in the journals and conference papers; of course there's also a lot of crap. But I'd say most of the crap comes from wishful thinking rather than pure crackpottery. If nothing else, if you try to implement something that doesn't work, you'll know immediately -- thus CS at least potentially has a built-in reality check that pure math lacks. I rather suspect that whether or not a CS journal demands working code from its authors is a strong predictor for the quality of the articles which appear in that journal.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yea, I read through a bit of the cited paper and got a few good laughs out of it. Maybe he's being published more for the humorous aspect of it all than for the actual information.
which is why academic publishing is seriously screwed up. the public pays taxes to fund most academic research, but then researchers have to pay journal publishers in order to get their papers published. and in return, the publishers retain the copyright to all public research, keeping it out of the hands of the tax payers who funded it (and charging Universities up the ass to have access to their own research).
people used to justify this commingling of academia with commercial interests by the peer-review process involved in journal publication, but the peer-review process provided by academic journals clearly isn't working here. at this point, it would be far better for Universities to publish their own research papers, allowing public research to be made freely available to students, researchers, and anyone else who might be interested in it.
research papers could be published in online databases where they would be archived for easy public access. it's easy enough for independent writers to self-publish and distribute their writings online. so it should be no problem for Universities to do the same. the peer-review process of papers submitted for publication could be handled either by the University itself, or different Universities could get together and form an agreement whereupon they would review one another's papers for free. this would keep academic research purely non-commercial and eliminate potential conflicts of interest.
eliminating/bypassing commercial publishing houses would also mean that societally beneficial projects like Google Book Search wouldn't be stonewalled by greed-driven publishers, and public good could be placed before corporate interests for once. Wikipedia is nice and all, but serious research would greatly benefit from all academic research being made freely available in a searchable online database for all to access. after all, public research isn't very useful if no one has access to it.