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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 the immortal words of Tom Hanks, I don't get it.
If the guy is a well known crackpot, what harm is happening? Obviously, I am not a citizen of this sub-world and could use the enlightenment.
Yeah, you really have to be careful out there... that's why I get all my astronomy and mathematical insight (as well as web design hints) from http://www.timecube.com/
And if it ain't there, then I just look it up on wikipedia
Where's the article?
Ohhh! Right right! This is the article. Slashdot is now a primary source!
Wouldn't it be straightforward to adjust the impact factor to only include references to a different journal. That is, a reference to an article that you published doesn't count.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
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?
If you want to automatically determine what constitutes a good journal purely from data, the definition is something like: is frequently cited by other good journals. Obviously, there's a circularity there. Various techniques attempt to mitigate it, but none are perfect, and indeed most are rather simplistic and easy to game. It's basically hard to distinguish, purely from citation data, a vibrant community of legitimate research from a vibrant community of crackpots.
In real life, most academics get around the circularity problem by starting with a set of "known good" journals that are determined by consensus in the field rather than algorithms (though this may sometimes be controversial). That lets them take into account more subjective things such as status of a research community (crackpots or not?). For example, as the linked article points out, the Annals of Mathematics is generally accepted as a top-quality venue for mathematics.
If you wanted, you could then construct an Annals-centric view of mathematical impact automatically by seeing how frequently other journals are cited by papers in Annals. This is what happens informally as journals gain and lose reputation: a promising new venue often first comes to a community's attention because its articles begin to be cited in "known good" journals.
But just taking all journals with no starting point, and attempting to extract from the citation graph which ones are "good" purely from the links, is doomed to failure, because there just isn't enough information in there to make the distinctions people want to make.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with impact factors is that they don't measure the quality of the papers, they just measure the number of times they're referenced. The thought is that the number of times a paper is referenced is proportional to the quality. Sort of like the concept behind Google Page Rank - more inward pointing links means that the site is "better". ... Except that relying solely on incoming links doesn't work to well if people start to game the system. Google, who made it's name with the power of Page Rank, has since demoted it to "one of the factors" in determining result positioning, recognizing that simply counting incoming links leaves them wide open to manipulation. They're also ruthless about plonking anyone who is found trying to game the system. Impact factors don't have this defense - it's a straight sum-and-divide operation, with little to no adjustments or oversight.
As I understand it, this sort of "gaming" is why crappy fringe journals sometimes get huge impact factors. What happens is, deliberately or not, the authors in those journals self-reference like crazy, jacking up the references per article count. It's like a set of websites which all link to each other extensively, but have very few incoming links from outside their clique. IIRC, Google compensates for this now, while impact factors do not.
I've noticed a disturbing trend towards reliance on impact factors in judging the importance of work (say in tenure evaluations, etc.). The more importance people attach to such a flimsy system, the more frequently you'll hear such cases of gaming the system.
Science is built on reputation. If you have a good reputation, then people take your work seriously. If one of your publications is a hoax or fraud, your career is over. This smells like yesterday's fish's sweaty socks.
Hell, expect Blogoavich to issue a statement tomorrow disavowing any association with this guy or his publications. It smells that bad.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The summary claims Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, has a high impact factor. The blog linked to, however, does not assert this, and I see no source for it. He does also co-edit the International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation, which the blog asserts "flaunt its high 'impact factor'." The link to the IJNSNS praising him is broken, so I can't confirm that.
It looks to me like some crackpot got a journal. However, it doesn't seem particularly devastating. Nobody has based work on his articles purely on the basis of the "Impact Factor." I don't think anyone else is taking him seriously. At worst, libraries have paid to subscribe.
Slashdot is a bit late in reporting these news... I tried to submit them earlier when the news was fresher.
The problem at heart is that one of the biggest and evillest academic publishers, Elsevier, has been supporting a crackpot.
This shows that Elsevier isn't doing enough to promote the quality of research, and worse, libraries are paying huge fees with tax money for worthless journals. The problem here is bundling; university libraries have to buy in bundles journals, one of which may contain crackpot ideas as this one did.
Boycott Elsevier! Let's have open access already.
This has been a fascinating case of Crackpottery. Read the blog and the subsequent replies. El Naschie seems to make it (Quantum Mechanical babble-speak) up as he goes along ,but unless you are an expert in this area, as Dr. John Baez is, it would be difficult for the casual reader to discern this. This is similar to the Bogdanov affair, another well know scientific scam. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair )I'm a little surprised it took this long for Slashdot to discover this one.
One other thing: One of Baez's beefs among others is that this bogus El Naschie journal is bundled with more respectable journals and Elsevier profits from the bogus science.
Alas, something I discovered to my sorrow over the years is that sufficiently specialized math is indistinguishable from gobbledygook (and vice versa).
they were heavily taken by "cold fusion researchers," a canard in three dimensions if ever I heard one, 20 years back. perhaps they occupy the same place in scientific literature as S&P and Moody's does in careful review of bonding and finance? down Illinois' way, they call it "pay to play."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
People used to say about a mathematician or physicist that "what he is doing is so important that only a few people in the world can understand what he is talking about."
In a few cases it was actually true.
Also, there were mathematicians who believed that the highest form of mathematics was work that had no practical application. There was a story that the inventor of matrix theory expressed pride that he had invented a form of mathematics with absolutely no practical use. Little did he know how extensively his work could be used. He would have been appalled.
There still seems to be a feeling that the less people are able to understand a paper in a math journal, the more important the paper is likely to be.
At one time I was a subscriber to the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Papers in math journals usually assume that you know every paper previously written by the author and the others in the field. There is often very little introductory material and no tutorial material in these papers. Even if you have a general understanding of the topic, you can't follow the papers because they are written very concisely, and assume that nothing needs to be explained if it was ever published anywhere else. You may have to backtrack for years of someone's papers and still not be able to understand the paper you are trying to read.
This is probably a combined consequence of "publish or perish" in academia and page limits in journals. It is often hard to tell if a given paper makes any sense or is useful.
I guess you could call it job security through obscurity.
This is an example of the sort of abuse we get all the time from ignorant people. I inherited this science from my father, an ex-used-car salesman and part-time window-box, and I am very proud to be in charge of the first science with free gifts. You get this luxury tea-trolley with every new enrolment. In addition to this you can win a three-piece lounge suite, this luxury caravan, a weekend for two with Peter Bonetti and tonight's star prize, the entire Norwich City Council.
The people who most directly care about especially quick-to-skim summaries of quality (like impact factor) are people judging the output of professors. If you're not familiar with a sub-field, how do you separate the professor who's published 20 lame papers in questionable venues from the professor who's published 20 high-quality papers in the top journals of his field? You look at some sort of rating for the venues he's published in.
For reading papers, I agree it's not quite as relevant. I still do do a first pass of filtering by using my subjective views of publication quality, though. I'm more likely to give some surprising-sounding claim a thorough evaluation if it was published in a reputable journal than if it was published as a PDF on the internet, or in some obscure conference. You can't read everything, and the well-known conferences and journals in my area provide one level of vetting that I can rely on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Mathematicians use all sorts of funky ancient Greek symbols to express their thoughts. It's like trying to read an APL program.
If mathematicians could represent their concepts in car analogies, maybe ordinary folks would be able to understand what all the fuss is about.
At least, here, on Slashdot, where the car analogy is the lingua franca.
And the mathematicians might have some fun with it. How would you express the concept of isomorphic, infinite-dimensional, separable Hilbert spaces with a car analogy?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
When the first questionable but exciting buzzwords come to life, just explain away the doubters with more buzzwords that sound even better!!
Elsevier, just like other large commercial publishers of scientific journals, offers libraries a significant discount if they subscribe to their whole catalog.
By including crappy, useless and inexpensive (for them) journals, they can siphon more money out of universities and into the pockets of their shareholders, as is their god-given duty as capitalists.
It does not help the cause of the sole source of criticism, a math blog from U. Texas, to have ostensibly technical criticism asserting incorrectness but admitting ignorance (see second link in summary). The author takes issue with some points in an article of which he has some experience. However, he points out several things that he has no knowledge of and admits as much. He then asserts from this admitted position of ignorance that the material with which has is not familiar is somehow fraudulent. To make that claim valid the author would have to be able to determine that with certainty, but he can't.
This technical criticism is produced in support of a posting elsewhere in the same blog, the author of which makes the same sort of assertions, and likewise fails to support most of them. In fact he can produce partial support for only one, and then claims support from others which is not produced. Some of this supposedly comes from his own administration which he admits does not support his work pursuing the matter.
I take no position with regards to the central issue. I've seen a couple journals with very incestuous editorial policies and staffs. It makes it hard for others to get published. However, the situation evolved into this because those people did a lot of work with each other, not because any of it was fraudulent, so this can happen in an absence of any wrong doing.
Claims of wrong doing are extremely serious, as the occurrence of such things are. Such claims should be supportable. The claims made in TFA that are supportable are not of evidence wrong doing, and claims of wrong doing are unsupported, and by admission, unsupportable by those making them. As far as I can tell this is a single blog's flamefest with more crackpot value than what they claim is due their target.
In short, the accusers appear to be embedded in at least as much pot and crack as they accuse others of, failing utterly to differentiate themselves from kettle. They may have a valid point, but they fail to show it, instead making themselves look all the worse through the use of reciprocal psychoceramics.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Citation indices like citeseer distinguish self-citations from non-self-citations; if you pick some random paper that has both, you'll see a tally like "81 citations -- 7 self". Does Thomson Scientific not actually bother to do that in computing its impact factor?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you're a new researcher in an obscure field, one of the best ways to advance is to assemble a group of researchers interested in similar topics, hold a conference so everyone can get to know each other, publish the conference proceedings, and then you all publish like crazy citing each other's papers - this then bootstraps the whole group's rankings.
Another thing you see happening is that journals are wary of single-author papers, so it's kinda accepted that if you write a paper all by yourself, you invite a few mates to be co-authors, to make the thing look more legitimate and to improve its statistical ranking (with three authors rather than one, a paper has three times as many incoming and outgoing author links, and correspondingly greater connectivity).
If you see a paper published in a major journal, with fifty authors, you know that each one of those fifty people probably can't personally vouch for every detail in the paper. If they could, you wouldn't need fifty of them.
You also know that when you go through the most cited authors in physics, and find that someone appears to named as a co-author on ~300 successfully-published papers a year, that that person is probably a head of department, and may not have actually read all the papers with their name on, let alone been involved in any of the scientific work.
Eric Baird
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.
As a published scientific author-
Elsevier sucks!
They have bought important 'name' journals and charge for everything (including your pre-prints) that they possibly can. Many reputable departments are boycotting their publications now.
They even bought me a nice dinner once in Tokyo. I guess that was a sign they were making too much money and had no idea how to spend it.