The Scholarly Kitchen

The controversial math journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, is back in business with two new Editors-in-Chief, a revised scope, and a more explicit set of policies about how it conducts review, specifically when manuscripts are submitted by its own editors.

According to a news release posted on March 16th, the publisher, Elsevier, has appointed two new “Co-Editors in-Chief” — Maurice Courbage (France) and Paolo Grigolini (USA), along with a new slate of editorial board members. The editorial board page still lists M.S. El Naschie as its founding editor.

In 2008, this journal became the center of a controversy over lax peer-review standards when five articles appeared in the same issue authored by the Editor-in-Chief himself, M.S. El Naschie.  Whether or not El Naschie used the journal to promote himself and his own work, there was a widespread impression of editorial misconduct. Shortly thereafter, El Naschie’s retirement was announced.

The journal then put a stop to submissions , resumed publication, and spent several months publishing a long backlog of accepted manuscripts, including a string of articles by the retired Editor-in-Chief. It had all the appearances that the journal was in the process of closing shop.

Nearly two years later, the journal is reopening.

The new journal description page  includes detailed information about the editorial decision-making process, detailing the appropriate steps when manuscripts are submitted by members of the journal’s own editorial board:

In keeping with Elsevier’s guidelines on potential editorial conflicts of interest, manuscripts (co-)authored by one of the co-Editor-in-Chief will be handled fully by the other co-Editor-in-Chief in an undisclosed review process. Similar disclosure arrangements are made in the case of Associate Editors (co-)authoring a manuscript.

The publisher also now states that as of January 2008, all Elsevier journals are members of — and thus abide by — the ethical standards established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Last year, Elsevier admitted to publishing six fake medical journals between 2000 and 2005 with sponsorship from a major pharmaceutical company and including republished articles that supported the company’s products.  An initial refusal to investigate the issue lead many to question how serious the publisher was in adhering to their own ethical standards.

The August 30th issue of the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals was published on Monday this week. It contains six articles by the former editor-in-chief, Mohamed El Naschie.

It was followed on Tuesday with the publication of the September 15th issue boasting no less than seven El Naschie articles.

Both issues are unusually large (85 and 93 articles respectively), more than twice the size of normal issues and released several months ahead of schedule.

While the size of issues has grown, the list of associate editors has shrunk and is now missing Steven Bishop, professor of mathematics at University College London.

According to the publisher’s website, the journal is still attempting to find a new editor, although it has maintained its submission stop and encourages authors to submit to other Elsevier journals.

The backlog of unpublished papers — once holding nearly 1,000 papers in press — is down to 329.

The lack of a replacement editor-in-chief, coupled with the submission stop and haste to clear its backlog, all suggest a publisher rushing to close the journal.

A controversy in the mathematical physics community erupted late last year over the practice of the controversial Editor-in-Chief, Mohamed El Naschie’s practice of publishing his own articles.  While this practice was not new, it came to a head last December, with five of his papers appearing in the same issue. El Naschie is the founding editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which began publishing in 1991.  His practice of self-publishing began in 1998.

It appears that the embattled journal, Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, is closing shop.

While the publisher claims that it is still seeking a new editor-in-chief, it has reestablished a submission stop and encourages authors to seek another Elsevier journal for their submissions:

Currently we have many accepted Chaos, Solitons and Fractals papers waiting to be published. We feel it is inappropriate to keep scientists waiting too long before their research paper is published and therefore, for the moment, we are not accepting any new submissions to the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.

We trust you understand our decision and we hope you will find another suitable journal for publication of your research paper (please have a look at: www.elsevier.com). We apologise for any inconvenience and please do consider us again for your next upcoming research paper.

Since resuming publication earlier this year, the publisher has been playing catch-up with nearly 1,000 articles in press.  Once lagging behind in publication by several months, they are now ahead of schedule by nearly two months, publishing the July 30th issue just this week.  The size of each issue has expanded from approximately 300 pages to over 500 pages.  The backlog of articles in press now stands at 564.  At this rate of publishing, the backlog should take about 10 issues or a few remaining months to complete.

A controversy in the mathematical physics community erupted late last year over the practice of the controversial editor-in-chief, Mohamed El Naschie’s practice of publishing his own articles.  While this practice was not new, it came to a head last December, with 5 of his papers appearing in the same issue. El Naschie is the founding editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which began publishing in 1991.  His practice of self-publishing began in 1998.

Since the self-publishing scandal broke in December 2008, no further articles by El Naschie have been published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.  In addition, his articles are absent from the journal’s backlog of articles in print.  A search in MathSciNet and the Web of Science reveals no publications since his retirement.

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, the controversial Elsevier journal in mathematical physics still has no editor-in-chief, although this hasn’t stopped the journal from publishing articles.

The journal appears to be playing catch-up with an extensive backlog of articles in-press, reducing the number to 706 (as of May 5), down from 942 reported three months ago when the journal announced a “temporary submission stop.”  Since resuming publication, none of the issues have contained an article from the retired founder and Editor-in-Chief, Mohamed El Naschie.

The controversy over this journal erupted over a December 2008 issue of Chaos, which included 5 articles published by El Naschie.  Widespread speculation on whether the Editor-in-chief was using his position to bypass peer review was at the heart of the uproar.  The Elsevier website still states that El Naschie has retired and that the publisher is working with the editorial board to find a new editor.

What is surprising is that the number of articles in press has be reduced so drastically in such a short period since resuming publication.  One has to ask whether this journal has the intention of actually finding a new editor, or whether it is preparing to close shop?

The Elsevier mathematics journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals has resumed publishing, although its future remains unclear.

The journal halted publication after its editor-in-chief, Mohammed El Naschie, became embroiled in a controversy over publishing his own work.  The last issue alone  (December, 2008) contained 5 of his articles.

The journal has 916 articles in press — a backlog representing about 18 months of papers waiting to be published.

The latest issue, now six weeks overdue, was released yesterday and contains no articles from the former-editor-in-chief, although it does include the following publisher’s note:

The Founding Editor for Chaos, Solitons and Fractals Dr El Naschie has retired as Editor-in-Chief. The publisher will work with the editorial board and other advisors to identify a new editor. This is likely to also lead to revision of the aims and scope of the journal, as well as the editorial policies and submission arrangements. Prospective authors can keep informed of the progress on this through the journal’s homepage. [emphasis mine]

This middle sentence, although terse, may signal that the controversy over this one journal may not be over.

It’s official — the embattled editor-in-chief of the math journal, Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, is out.  A new editor has not been announced, yet the number of accepted manuscripts waiting for publication has grown to nearly one-thousand, according to the journal’s website.

A controversy in the mathematical physics community erupted late last year over the practice of the controversial editor-in-chief, Mohamed El Naschie’s practice of publishing his own articles.  While this practice was not new, it came to a head last December, with 5 of his papers appearing in the same issue. El Naschie is the founding editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which began publishing in 1991.  His practice of self-publishing began in 1998.

Because of the backlog in accepted manuscripts, the publisher has asked for a “temporary submission stop” so as not to exacerbate the publication delay for authors.  As of February 5, 2007, there were 942 articles in press.  All of these articles are corrected proofs, meaning they merely lack an issue and page number.  All have been formatted in fulltext and PDF, have been registered with a DOI and contain a full citation (albeit one that says “in press”).

So why the wait for the new editor-in-chief to “publish” them?

In a strict sense, these articles have been published.  They merely lack the formality of an issue and page number designation.  This sounds strangely anachronistic in an age of digital publishing.

Scientific publishing is a gift-economy, with authors exchanging manuscripts for peer-recognition.  The exclusivity of a journal, the prestige of the editorial board, and its editor-in-chief, all play a role in rewarding the author for his or her gift.  No one wants to associate their work with a controversy, especially a controversy that questions the integrity of the peer-review process.  The fact that an article was originally accepted nearly two years ago under the old editor is important, but may be missed in the general Zeitgeist of a journal.

Waiting for the blessing of the editor-in-chief before an article is formally published may be ceremonial in nature, but ceremony is at the core of scientific rewards.

How many scientists does it take to decide how to allocate research funds in the United Kingdom?

Answer: More than a thousand, and it takes over a year and costs more than £10 million (nearly US$15 million) to do it, according to a report in last week’s issue of the journal Science.

The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has been in existence since 1986 and has been used by the UK government to allocate departmental funding for the next five years.  The 6th report was released on December 18th, 2008,  which had administrators dashing to check their rank.  They will need to wait until March 2009 to find out what this means in terms of funding.  About £1.5 billion (US$2.2 billion) in government funding is distributed each year.

The 2008 RAE is the last assessment that will rely primarily on massive peer-review.   The government intends to move to a more quantitative approach, combining several metrics such as citations to published papers, competitive grants received, and Ph.D.s granted.  While this will ultimately speed up the evaluation process (and ultimately make it cheaper to conduct), it may come with its own problems.

While citations correlate strongly to subjective measures of quality, we assume that this relationship persists when the method of evaluation changes.  Researchers may change their behavior when their goal is to maximize their citation count as opposed to maximizing their prestige in the eyes of their peers.

Rest assured, I’m not going to infer that no one has attempted to play the citation game.  I recently reported on the case of a journal editor, M. S. El Naschie, whose practice of self-citation may have greatly inflated the impact factor of his journal.  We also know of cases of editors contacting the authors of manuscripts under review to cite more journal content for the same reason.

Honorary authorship, where an individual (such as the head of a department) is listed on the byline of an article without having contributed significantly to the work  is common, especially in the biomedical sciences.  When citations result in monetary reward, we can expect that these practices will become commonplace.  What we may not expect are more devious forms of citation inflation, such as the rise of informal “cartels” between journals, editors, or researchers whose goal it is to mutually inflate citations counts — a kind of informal “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” agreement.

Moving to a more quantitative form of evaluation may reduce time and expense — but only in the short-term.  In the long-term, as certain metrics become corrupt and meaningless, the bean counters will need to move back to the judgments of peers.

Image by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL via Flickr

Scientific controversies are rare learning opportunities.  They give us a view of the soft underbelly of science that is often hidden by the mundane details of everyday life.  They show us how the system reacts to being tested and prodded, and how people in leadership behave under pressure.  Most importantly, they show us how unwritten social norms — not the formal rules found in textbooks — are responsible for the conduct of science.

As I wrote in my post entitled, “Elsevier Math Controversy,” it wasn’t completely clear why Mohamed El Naschie was being sanctioned by the math and theoretical physics community (as viewed on the n-Category Café), although several issues (self-publishing, self-citation, and academic credentials) appear to be working in concert.

It would be easy to argue that by publishing articles in his own journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, El Nashie created a crisis of confidence in the peer-review process.  The editor-in-chief is a position of great power, and the publishing of one’s own work (especially in such quantity) questions whether El Naschie was using his editorial power to further his own ends.  It does not matter whether his articles were, in fact, peer-reviewed, as questioned by members of the mathematical physics community.  There is a perception that El Naschie shortcut the process, and this alone is a valid concern for the integrity of the journal.  This is the textbook answer.

A more complete answer may be found in the larger community of mathematical physicists.  But in order to explain this one, we have to stop thinking of journals the way most of us think of journals — collections of articles on a related topic — and start thinking of journals as social systems.

A journal is a community of individuals, and membership in each community is conferred with the successful transfer of a manuscript.  If this gift is accepted, the author receives a symbolic transfer of prestige back from that community.  Prestige is legitimated when it is recognized by the broader scientific community.  If I have never heard of your journal, then being an author means nothing to me.  If your article is published in a controversial journal, then that association is transferred as well.

By injuring the reputation of a journal, an editor undermines the willingness of future authors to trade their manuscripts for prestige.  These authors will gladly take their gifts elsewhere; there are thousands of journals starving for manuscripts.  Moreover, those authors who have already published in a questionable journal cannot automatically disassociate themselves.  They are stuck with the stigma that comes from associating with that community.

Journals have little more than their reputations, and reputations can be damaged very quickly by a controversy. This is why editors are so swift to defend their journals and the editorial process in the face of a controversy.  When the editor is the center of the controversy, there is no recourse.  There is little that a publisher can do to defend an editor except ask him politely to step down and bring a swift end to the affair.

This controversy reminds us that science is ultimately built on reputation, although you will not find this in any textbook.

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• Self-Publishing Editor to Retire

Fractal Blues by Fábio Pinheiro via Flickr

According to news in the November 26 issue of Nature, the controversial editor of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is set to retire early next year.

Mohomed El Naschie, author of five of the articles in the last issue of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals and nearly 300 in the journal since its inception, has been the center of a controversy about whether his is using the journal to promote his own work.

it’s plain obvious that there was either zero, or at best very poor, peer review, of his own papers

claims Peter Woit, a mathematical physicist at Columbia University as quoted in the Nature article.

According to Elsevier’s director of corporate relations, El Naschie’s retirement will be announced formally in the first issue of 2009.  El Naschie started the journal in 1991 and has been editor-in-chief ever since.  A subscription to Chaos, Solitons & Fractals costs US$4,520, although most institutions have access to its content through Elsevier’s Science Direct bundle.

El Naschie’s website lists several affiliations and honorary professorships with reputable institutions, all of which could not be confirmed by Nature.  Walter Greiner, a former director of the Institute of Physics at Goethe University in Germany, claims that El Naschie is certainly not a distinguished fellow of the institute as he claims to be.  Greiner also claims that El Naschie has ignored his requests to have his name removed from the journal’s list of honorary editorial members.

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Image by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL via Flickr

There is something odd about the December 2008 issue of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, an Elsevier journal covering topics in mathematics, physics, and engineering.  Five of the articles are written by the editor, Mohamed El Naschie.

This did not go unnoticed in the academic community.

The Case of M. S. El Naschie was posted on The n-Category Café, a community blog on math, physics, and philosophy by mathematical physicist, John Baez, and has attracted significant discussion and inquiry such as:

• Can someone really produce as much literature as El Naschie?  There are over 300 single-authored articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals attributed to him.
• Do his papers even make sense?
• Why does the publisher allow El Naschie to use the journal as his personal vehicle for dissemination?
• Is Professor Mohamed El Naschie who he said he is?  Are his credentials legitimate?

What is interesting about the discussion is that El Naschie hasn’t done anything explicitly wrong.  I know of no journal that has a limit on how many articles it will publish per author and it is natural that some scientists produce much more literature than others.  I also know of several editors who publish their own work in their own journals, often placing their articles higher in the publication order.  There have been no claims that El Naschie has plagiarized the work of others, and because his work is not based on experimental observation, no one has made allegations that he has fabricated data.

El Naschie is clearly a highly-cited author.  Using ISI’s Web of Science, I counted 3,049 citations to his work, although 2,497 (or 82%) are self-citations.  Since almost all of his work (indexed by ISI) is published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, this creates a significant upward bias on the Impact Factor of this journal. [see Correction below]

Some people posting on The n-Category Café claim that his articles make no sense and are full of trendy buzzwords.  Others, coming to El Naschie’s defense claim that he is a genius and simply misunderstood by his peers. I’m no mathematician, so I can’t arbitrate these claims.

A more substantive comment questions how much oversight the publisher should have on this journal and whether the practices of the editor, functioning as author, is harming the reputation of this journal.

Another stream of posts questions the credentials of Mohamed El Naschie, why some of his titles and awards cannot be verified, and why he resorts to a P.O. box in the United Kingdom as his address.  Peers also questioned how El Naschie promotes himself on his website, with prominent photos of himself posing with Nobel Laureates in Physics, or self-promotional videos posted on YouTube.  Clearly this is an academic who takes himself very seriously.

While El Naschie may have not done anything explicitly wrong by publishing five of his own articles in a journal to which he is editor, he may have broken several implicit and unwritten norms in academia.  As a result, his peers have started questioning his work, his motives, and even his identity.

Correction [date: February 12, 2009]:

The self-citation rate printed in this blog suffers from a miscalculation:   The self-citation percentage (defined as the number of El Naschie authored articles that cite his own work as a fraction of the total number of articles that cite El Naschie’s work) is 32%, or 263/821.  Estimates that count the proportion of self-citations as a proportion of total citations results in approximately the same answer.  These errors were inadvertent and entirely mine.  I sincerely appologize to Dr. El Naschie and anyone else who was affected by this miscalculation.