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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