24 December 2008

The power of self-citation and self-publishing – the case of el Naschie

El Naschie, a civil engineer is the editor-in-chief of a journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. He is also an author on 322 papers published in this journal, 36 alone in the December 2008 issue. Lest you think this is some open access journal published on the internet, it is in fact published by Elsevier and has a 2007 impact factor of 3.025! The scandal of El Naschie has been blogged about at length and is the subject of a Nature News article announcing El Naschie's retirement from the position of editor (it appears that many of his papers were unlikely to have been refereed). El Naschie has an h-Index of 28 which goes down to 20 when you take out self-citations – a pretty impressive drop – but it would decrease dramatically again if you took out all of the citations from El Naschie's followers (yes, he has quite a few for reasons that no-one can quite fathom) who have their own journal – the International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation – not surprisingly it has an impact factor of 5.099 - so, guess which 2 journals cite the most articles in the Int J Nonlin Sci Num? Chaos Soliton Fract and Int J Nonlin Sci Num which account for nearly 30% of all cites. Oh and guess what. El Naschie is a Co-Editor of IJNSNS (according to the publisher's site). Although to be fair, IJNSNS is only $250 per year from somewhere in Tel Aviv, compared to CSF which is about $4000 from Elsevier.

The web of intrigues doesn't stop here – but goes on with bogus editors – RS MacKay (Warwick University) is listed as an editor of the IJNSNS on their website but he stopped this role in 2003 according to his CV.

I am not sure how many mathematicians/physicists know about these two journals and would have been aware of their shonkiness – it doesn't appear as though either Thomson Reuters or Elsevier has any process to deal with issues such as these. As for potential authors out there – it pays to stick with the well known journals.

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# David Glance's Blog said:

Following on the heels of suspect maths journals (notice the self-citation) comes a conference paper

25 December 08 at 11:08 AM
# SO said:

Dear friends, The power of self citation is nothing compared to the power of defamation on the internet.  You are allowed to use pseudo names and scandalize people at will.  John Baez said that El Naschie is an imposter and has no Ph.D.  You and John Baez are pretending that El Naschie has been hiding for 20 years, publishing his work in his own journal.  How can you hide when you are cited visibly as the Author and as Editor in Chief everywhere for 20 years is something which you must teach us first.  You all know very well that every Editor in Chief publishes in his own journal and El Naschie is no exception.  In fact other Editors in Chief publish far more.  The whole thing is an artificial defamation campaign connected to an infamous article published a few months ago in Scientific American.  The article in Nature was commisioned by certain people and paid for in certain ways.  The whole thing is subject to a High Court case in Germany and in England and I wish you would have the courage to leave this comment on your site so that other people can tell you we told you so.  However we know better.  You are just a branch of John Baez one man internet army and you allow the publication of defamatory allegations only.

03 January 09 at 2:28 AM
# kk said:

Believe it or not

El naschie had four articles whose titles containing Witten. The articles are

1- A few hints and some theorems about Witten's M theory and T-duality,

Chaos,Solitons and Fractals 25 (2005)545-548

2- Using Witten's five Brane theory and the holographic principle to derive the value of the electromagnetic structure constant alpha =1/137,

Chaos,Solitons and Fractals 38 (2008)1051-1053

3- Fuzzy knot theory interpretation of Yang ûMills instantons and Witten's 5-Brane model,

Chaos,Solitons and Fractals 38 (2008)1349 -1354

4- On the Witten-Duff Branes model together with knots theory and E 8 E 8 super strings in a single fractal spacetime theory,

Chaos, Solitons and Fractals xxx (2008)xxx-xxx . The article is still in press, but you can get the pdf. file.

The amazing thing about the references of the first three articles is that they don't contain any research paper for Witten. Finally, the great man realized his mistake and put a reference for Witten in the fourth one (the most recent one). But the man didn't acknowledge who pointed out to him this bug in his program which he used to generate papers (Backreaction blog). Any way this a good step, at least the references are now correctly produced. Unfortunately you still need further improvement in your code that seems has a serious problem with E. Witten. Although you referred to a paper of Witten the program has produced a wrong title for it. In the references list we find

[4 ]Witten E. Searching for a realistic Kaluza-Klein Theory. Nucl Phys B 1981;186:412 û28.

While the correct title turned out to be, as you can check yourself:

Search for a realistic Kaluza-Klein theory

Nuclear Physics B, Volume 186, Issue 3, 10 August 1981, Pages 412-428, Edward Witten

As N. Eisfeld wrote on Mar. 26, 2008 @ 18:32 GMT, in fqxi blog, http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/395 describing El naschie

"This man has never bad-mouthed, ignored or downplayed anyone or any contribution. He also acknowledged every single person who contributed to his work unless he genuinely did not know and then he will immediately apologize of the unintended omission."

04 January 09 at 6:46 PM
# Otto Rössler said:

Der ZEIT Artikel über Hr. Mohammed S. El-Naschie, den größten Physiker unserer Zeit wurde nun endlich entfernt. Es ist eine Schande wie die Neider Hr. El-Naschie immer wieder den Nobelpreis vorenthalten. Es muss mit seinem Einsatz für Israel zu tun haben oder damit, dass er Muslim oder Araber ist. Seine Theorien sind bahnbrechend und jeder der das nicht findet ist doof. Und wird verklagt. Die ZEIT hat jetzt eingesehen, wer hier den Längeren hat. Hr. El-Naschie lässt sich doch nicht von einer renommierten deutschen Wochenzeitung diktieren, was wahr ist und was nicht. Er ist der Erfinder unzähliger nach ihm benannter Theorien! Er hat in sich schon irgendwie immer recht! Und das kann er auch mit Geld und Einfluss gegenüber der ZEIT durchsetzen. Und Hr. El-Naschie hat als Leidtragender nun irgendwie im Nachhinein logischerweise auch das Recht, den Autoren Hr. Drösser mit Hitler zu vergleichen. Zum Beispiel hier in diesem Blog: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe

Wie auch immer. Das Gute hat gesiegt. Nieder mit der Wahrheit, der Pressefreiheit und dem LHC! Jeder der das anders sieht ist ein Nazi!

Es lebe das Selbstplagiat und der Wissenschaftsbetrug!

27 February 09 at 8:15 AM
# ross said:

Once again, the great man El naschie proved his capital power. He manged to remove the german article, but already the damge was done. I hope he can do the same with nature article, as an advice try to pay more (more is different).  As is clear El naschie has three powers that are, self-publishing, self-citation and capital power.

I think it would be better for nobel prize comittee  to create a new nobel prize for the worst physicist like oscar for the worst actor.  The best candidate would be El naschie. At least Gerrard tHooft  can nominate him for the prize, as El naschie matches exactly his criteria for a bad theoritacal physicist.

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theoristbad.html

By the way one can find the german article in the site

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/395

you can upload the article from the comment due

Gm wrote on Jan. 29, 2009 @ 11:36 GMT.

The responsible for fqxi site removed El naschie's shameful comments that contains his family shameful stories. In which his half brother Said El naschie stole the money of his own mother.

If  El naschie still has any little diginity,  one like him shoud disappear.  All his reaction demonstrate the reaction of fraud found out.

28 February 09 at 10:47 PM
# Jason said:

El Naschie Watch has the scoop.

http://elnaschiewatch.blogspot.com/

24 April 09 at 4:06 AM

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About david.glance

A technologist, working at UWA with students and other staff to research, develop and educate in the areas of web software and design.

UWA Centre for Software Practice in 2006 and have been developing software for universities and in the e-Health market.