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Crackpot Scandal In Mathematics
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 23, 2008 04:26 PM
from the kooks-we-have-always-with-us dept.
from the kooks-we-have-always-with-us dept.
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)."
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I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
The harm, I think, is that he's not a well-enough-known crackpot; a respectable publisher (Elsevier) has given him a journal as his own private playground. This makes it more difficult for non-crackpots trying to enter the field (e.g. grad students) to sort the wheat from the chaff. It also allows other crackpots to come off as more credible by citing crackpot articles which have a veneer of respectability. Imagine if a computer science "journal" based on Hollywood's portrayal of how computers work were being published by the ACM, and you have some idea of how big a problem this is.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a scam by Elsevier WRT bundling subscription (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:It's a scam by Elsevier WRT bundling subscripti (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like anyone with a working knowledge of CS probably has the ability to verify the CS research, math is a rather logical science which is often pretty easy to verify. Sure sure, there are things that are hard to confirm based on the amount of calculations that must be performed and irrational numbers and all that (infinity is a bitch to test), but those things exist in CS as well.
Its silly to some how imply they are vastly different from each other, they are in fact almost identical to each other.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Researchers in just about every field build on layers of other researchers' work. There simply isn't time to go back and verify every result in the reference tree of every article you site -- if you did that, you'd never get any original work done! Creating code that compiles and executes properly doesn't guarantee that everything you've based that code on is correct, of course, but it's a good sign. I'm not aware of any equivalent reality check in pure math. Now, I know relatively little about the field (applied CS and statistics is my game, specifically bioinformatics) so I'll happily accept a correction on this point.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad to be of service.
You realize, of course, that the only reason I was able to use a computer analogy is that we're talking about pure math. If we had been talking about CS, I'd have had to go with a car analogy right off the bat.
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
And it gets worse when money becomes involved. Pseudoscientists and crackpots often try to find "investors" for their schemes, and even a layman who performs due diligence can be fooled when publishers like Elsevier become enablers for pseudoscience. When the paper shows up in an INSPEC or Web of Science search, how is the person being scammed supposed to know that the paper isn't really legitimate?
Many "free energy" scam artists already have patents for their nonsensical inventions, thanks to the laxity of the USPTO. It'll get worse unless these "pseudo-journals" are exposed and publicized to the greater science and engineering community, as well as the public at large. I had never heard of El Naschie before today, because I'm not a mathematician; thanks to this article, more people like me will now keep an eye out for his future "work".
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Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that the way to test this would be to get a non-existent paper listed in Physics Abstracts, and cited in one or two major papers, and then see how many subsequent papers simply add the citation to their own list.
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I get all my science from timecube.com (Score:5, Funny)
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/ [timecube.com]
And if it ain't there, then I just look it up on wikipedia
Err... (Score:5, Funny)
Ohhh! Right right! This is the article. Slashdot is now a primary source!
Re:Err... (Score:4, Informative)
Where's the article?
Second link in the summary:
http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html [utexas.edu]
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Re:Err... (Score:4, Informative)
Second link in the summary
I really hate summaries that link bomb you and don't give you any clue which one is the main article.
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Tom Cruise? (Score:1)
At first, I thought the advertisement for Tom Cruise in Valkyrie was a related crackpot scandal story.
Prejudice (Score:1, Interesting)
The funny thing about this article is that it completely fails to mention the discussion about this on backreaction.blogspot.com -- even the bloggers there weren't so ignorant as to claim every paper to be rubbish.
This is the kind of blanket statement that completely self-defeats any argument. Any scientist or mathematician would know that, so what are you doing writing about science and math?
Impact Factor (Score:2, Interesting)
--
JimFive
Re:Impact Factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Excluding references to the same journal is too harsh a criterion, since a lot of high quality papers get published in high quality journals. What should be perhaps excluded, though, is self-citation (whether to your own articles in the same or a different journal). Also, papers published in a journal by a journal editor shouldn't count.
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How did he get the high impact factor? (Score:5, Informative)
How did El Naschie game the system?
According to Elsevier, his impact factor is 3.025 [elsevier.com], 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?
Re:How did he get the high impact factor? (Score:4, Informative)
Pick any of this recent papers and chances are good that most of the citations are to his own past papers. So, yes, that's how he's pulling it off: he cites himself ten times or so in each of his papers, and because he writes half the papers in each issue, that inflates the impact factor.
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a perennial problem in bibliometrics (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:a perennial problem in bibliometrics (Score:5, Insightful)
This turns out to be a problem space with some really interesting conclusions. I spent some time over the last few years working with researchers from MIT, UCSD and NBER to come up with ways to analyze this sort of problem. They were focused specifically on medical publications and researchers in the roster of the Association of American Medical Colleges. They identified a set of well-known "superstar" researchers, and traced the network of their colleagues, as well as the second-degree social network of their colleagues' colleagues among other "superstars".
I built a bunch of software to help them analyze this data, which we released as GPL'd open source projects (Publication Harvester [stellman-greene.com] and SC/Gen and SocialNetworking [stellman-greene.com]). I've gotten e-mail from a few other bibliometric researchers who have also used it. Basically, the software automatically downloads publication citations from PubMed for a set of "superstar" researchers, looks for their colleagues, and then downloads their colleagues' publication citations, generating reports that can be fed into a statistical package.
They ended up coming up with some interesting results. Here's a Google Scholar search [google.com] that shows some of the papers that came out of the study. They did end up weighting their results using journal impact factors, but the actual network of colleague publications served as an important way to remove the extraneous data.
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Impact Factors are a Joke (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Is it really a high impact factor journal? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Not exactly newest news... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot is a bit late in reporting these news... I tried to submit them earlier [slashdot.org] 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.
EL Naschie Affair (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:EL Naschie Affair (Score:5, Informative)
The Bogdanov affair is a little different. I did PhD research in theoretical physics but I was a bit unsure about the work of the Bogdanovs. There were bits of it that I could nitpick at and say it was definitely mistaken, but overall it was a little tricky to judge the bigger ideas without being a specialist in their particular subfield. The Bogdanovs had some smart people fooled. It's a very good hoax.
El Naschie's writing looks like nonsense even to non-specialists (though I guess you still need a degree in mathematics or physics). There's no way it could fool even beginners in the areas his work covers. That makes it all the more astonishing that he survived with Elsevier for so long. Apathy I guess.
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*shakes head sadly* (Score:5, Funny)
Alas, something I discovered to my sorrow over the years is that sufficiently specialized math is indistinguishable from gobbledygook (and vice versa).
Great stuff (Score:1)
Maybe now I'll finally get my numerology degree made.
In other news... (Score:2)
...there's a such thing as an "impact factor."
It's Elsevier... (Score:1, Interesting)
Half their journals are top-of-their-class, the other half are low-quality or almost useless garbage (like the example in the article) that still get cited more than they should because they show up automatically in searches in any of Elsevier's other journals or search databases. Oh, and of course this part:
"The fact that this journal costs $4520 per year would be hilarious, except that libraries are actually buying it - at a reduced rate, bundled in with other Elsevier journals, but still!"
Ah, bundling. It looks like a good deal, until you realize much of what you get in the bundle amounts to the journal equivalent of crapware and simply clutters up the library. Some of those journals I wouldn't pay $100 for, but the library has them wasting space on the shelves.
Job security through obscurity in mathematics (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
How insulting! (Score:2, Funny)
Buzzword Ponzi Scheme (Score:2, Insightful)
When the first questionable but exciting buzzwords come to life, just explain away the doubters with more buzzwords that sound even better!!
Deleting from the library would help (Score:2)
Crackpot Crackkettle Crackblack (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Not a whole lot to see here... (Score:2)
Basically what's being said here is that the academic publication system is vulnerable to the sorts of SEO attacks that briefly caused search engines to be befuddled by sites full of interlinked pages full of nonsense text and viagra ads. The academic publication system just moves a little slower, so it's going to take them a little longer to update things.
Sounds like the "custom books" story from April (Score:1)
It sounds like this jack-ass is using the system that Philip M Parker [nytimes.com] developed to create "custom books" where a computer network scours publicly available sources of information and then pieces together a "book" based on the information that it picks up. To someone scanning the books, you may not notice, but it you try to understand anything in it you can't help but realize that either the person that wrote it was a complete idiot, or it was computer generated.
Problem goes beyond mathematics (Score:1)
If only i knew.. (Score:1)
If only i knew someone that had the unstoppable urge to explain all this to me. I'd like that.
(talking math and physics in general here)
As a programmer, i wish i was better adept in math. Its interesting even when i don't understand it at all. If only..
and then i stumbled upon the links in the article.
Hey!
Math Reviews of El Naschie's papers (Score:1)
Research Paper generator (Score:2)
Looks like this El Naschie (is he a Mexican wrestler?) is using the Mathematics equivalent of SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator [mit.edu].
Grand unification theory, get him a Nobel price! (Score:2)
According to himself:
"However if we postulate a geometry which is so wild that it looks more like a stormy ocean to be the geometry of space-time, then both Einsteinâ(TM)s theory and quantum particle physics will fit in. That is more or less what I have done."
Oh, he has only created the great unification theory. My my, how unfortunate that he hasn't received his Nobel price yet. Gee.
Source:
http://www.el-naschie.net/el-naschie-physicist-details.asp?site=248 [el-naschie.net]
Cool Pop-up (Score:1)
Did anyone else get this cool popup from TFA?
"Internet Explorer does not support MathML (used here for equations) and has severely broken support for other Web Standards like CSS2 and XHTML.
Most Web designers have bent over backwards to shelter you from the failings of this wretched browser. We have not.
Aside from the equations, many things on these pages will render poorly or not at all in IE. If they do, We're sorry, but we aren't going to "fix it."
MathML support can be obtained with the aid of a new plugin. For the rest, you need to get yourself a Standards-Compliant browser, like Mozilla."
And it's not my fault. I'm at work and can't install a real brower.
all you need to know (Score:2)
1
elsiver is a for profit company
2 ,sustained by a 20 billion + endowment, buy everything, so all elsiveir has to do is say a years subscription = # librarys/cost * profit factor. And they have a pretty good idea of what # librarys is.
some librarys, think harvard
and of course, professors need to publish, so following Sturgeon's Law, see wikipedia, most of academic/science publications are not that important (empirical data: science citation index states that ~ half of all papers have one or fewer citations)
so there is this sort of game or collusion between the publishers, the funding agencys, the librarys and the academics to provide enough journals so that all the profs have some place to publish; there are a small number of journals - a handfull - that consistently have good quality stuff; most of the otheres just exist to make money for the publishers and jobs for the scientists (not to rant, but fusion power is another scam, just welfare for scientists, totally ludicrous)
A Sokal connection (Score:1)
The Null Hypotenuse (Score:1)
Clarifying journal ratings (Score:1)
Re:I want to tag this story "sowhat". (Score:1)
It is with great sorrow that I admit I read that as "sow hat" and was very confused. Today is not my day.
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Re:Caught (Score:1, Funny)
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