Re: The Kind of Email I Don’t Need
Dear all, my own experience is unlike John’s – namely crackpots avoid me, statistically speaking. Namely many producers of bogus “work” actually have high standing in academic world and I collected the data on two or three bigger groups of them and they try to push me away, so my crackpot repulsion index is higher than attraction index.
It is sad that some academic institutions and, in larger extent, some publishers back those people up. For example, Elsevier has a journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, included unfortunately in the A+ category in quality by the Australian Academy of Sciences, in a powerful commercial citation factory called Current Contents and with high “impact factor” over 3. It is not that in Chaos etc. there are no good papers, some are normal regular hard science. But, a significant and very visible percentage of papers there belong to one and the same group of people including the very editor, certain El Naschie, a person with many bogus affiliations, and writing in recent years papers with practically no arguments but high predictions based on numerology, coincidences and fancy pictures combining Lie algebras, chaos theory and so on, at the layman level.
In January 2008 he published 6 papers in his own journal, Current Contents indexes them, Elsevier gets 3000 euro for the subscriptions for such a journal (compare with around 250-300$ for Annals of Math.), it is bundled with some other journals if you take electronic version and then institutions lke Max Planck have to take it even if they do not want it.
In some of his January 2008 articles the main editor is quoting a Frankfurt Univ. affiliation, which had some truth in distant past but he is not in capacity to do it now. I was told that there is an investigation about using this affiliation now. I contacted some of the associate editors, most of whom did not respond to my question how such a behaviour is allowed. Two of them told me that they will quit from the editorial board, and one that his name was put on the editorial page without his consent!
I know that many people are aware of the stuff. When Urs visited me last month I mentioned this during the lunch and he was well aware of the nonsense papers often published there. I contacted one influential Nobel prize winner who knows El Nashchie and told me that he can’t or does not want to do much about it, and this is not a big thing and so on. And I was informed of huge influence of that guy in some middle east countries, what is not an argument which should be cited by a person of Nobel prize standing, and I feel it insulting for the decency of discussion. I do not care if the person is powerful; I care if he is right or wrong.
El Naschie is put in some other editorial boards and put in his editorial board editors of some reciprocal journals. I collected huge number of data on these things, but the publishers, my employer, colleagues etc. consider my effort not worthy of their support though they agree I am right. In countries like mine our promotions and so on depend if the journal is included in Current Contents list and so on, and the K-theory journal is not, although people like Alain Connes publish there, while Chaos Solitions and Fractals is, although people like El Naschie publish there. This is not justice and the scientific community will have to start staying nice observer of the fact that publishers do not care who is running their joirnals as long as the citation is high. Even if the citations are cross-citations of community of related journals of actually indefensible quality by international standards.
The friendly journal to Chaos etc is the International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation (see http://www.ijnsns.com/conf.html) where El Naschie is the associate editor and the main editor is Ji-Hun He, the guy whose one paper was the most cited paper in the last two years in math according to Scopus, another service sold by commercial publishers, and that is how I learned about this crackpot – I expected Tao, Perelman or Connes to be among top cited and not some low quality author (his papers are barely a bit better than what El Naschie is writing). To see what they think of themselves read http://www.ijnsns.com/conf.html:
“Our Chinese Scientists on Nonlinear Dynamics are in infinite love and admiration to both the man and his science.”
“Treading the path of El Naschie, we gather together to celebrate the century’s greatest scientist after Newton and Einstein, and share his greatest achievement.”
“the experimental verification of his theory will certainly lead to a Nobel prize, which we all expect.”
This journal has an impact factor about 4.38, which is double the best math journals like Annals or JAMS. And our fate in science is judged by the IF of journals where we publish. And I ask the readers of the n-category café to look at the quality of journals in IJNSNS for example.
Here are free sample papers:
http://www.ijnsns.com/2004-05-03/9-pi-new.pdf
http://www.ijnsns.com/2004-05-03/8-wan-electrospinning.pdf
A friend of mine said that in would not pass in a high school journal for math. And Thompson indexes such things and puts them in SCIE, calculates their impact factors and so on (IF is not calculated for many valuable journals in nonwestern countries but is for such a journal!). So crackpots are not really distinguished by Thompson from regular journals! What do you think of this??
Re: The Kind of Email I Don’t Need
Chaos, Solitons and Fractals still seems to publish el Naschie’s E-Infinity crackpot stuff. The reason is, that there are many of his followers in the editorial Board of Chaos Solitons and Fractals. Elsevier only fired El-Naschie. But, for example, editor J. J. He still publishes the EL-Naschie stuff:
Chaos, Solitons and Fractals
Volume 39, Issue 4, 28 February 2009, Pages 1667-1670
“A generalized poincare-invariant action with possible application in strings and E-infinity theory”
Ji-Huan He
Modern Textile Institute, Donghua University, 1882 Yanan Xilu Road, Shanghai 200051, China
It reads at the end:
“In forthcoming papers, we will study the properties of the generalized action and find their potential applications in string theory and E-infinity theory.
Hence, even more of EL-Naschie’s E_infinity stuff can be expected.
It seems that nature must write another article.
This shows a very dark light on Elsevier. Apparently, they did nothing. By firing only El Naschie, Elsevier has made the simplest thing that they could do. They did not even evaluate the scientific content of El Naschie’s articles. They did not withdraw this crackpot stuff. And they did not evaluate the articles or persons who frequently cite El Naschie’s articles. Then, they would immediately have found that there are other EL Naschie fans in the Editorial board. Apparently, Elsevier is fine with them publishing their crackpot nonsense.
Re: The Kind of Email I Don’t Need
I received no answer to the email I have sent to the Elsevier’s spokesperson about the issue a month ago. By starting publishing massively the backlog of 940 articles accepted during the El Naschie’s era, Elsevier sticks to the ignorance of scientific quality. Before they claimed they did not know of the problem, now they do (they shown it by several months of stalling the publicationm process for about 3 months).
J-H. He is editor of csf-friendly Journal of nonlinear sciences, which published a photo gallery of El Naschie, number of papers of El Naschie and followers and himself (J-H He) as well as famous ridiculous sentence that EN is the greatest scientist since Newton and Einstein.
In March 2009 issue (that is after Elsevier learned of full scale of the problem) there is J-H He’s nonsense article
* J-H He,Lan Hu, Number of elementary particles using exceptional Lie symmetry groups hierarchy, csf 39 (2009) 2119-2124
containing sort of repetition of El Naschie’s numerology about 9 missing particles. Not only nonsense but also, it seems to me, an outrageous plagiarism. The paper publishes previous “calculations” of El Naschie on the E-8 exceptional Lie group and numerology derivation of a number of elementary particles. El Naschie has clearly a case to sue his friend J-H He and Elsevier for publishing a clear case of plagiarism of his earlier “work”. :))
The paper has 55 references: Horawa-Witten 1, Witten 1, Kaku 2 and Nakahara’s book == that is 5; the other 50 references were published either in chaossf or in J-H He’s “journal” jinss (except two separate publications of J-H He in hiw own proceedings/books published by China Education and Culture Publisher 2005 and 2006); out of them there are
30 references by El Naschie, 11 by J-H He,
3 by their follower Marek-Crnjac who made a career writing historical articles about EL Naschie, 2 papers by their coeditor in chaossf G Iovane. No wonder that chaossf and jinss have hi impact factor; shame on Thomson ISI database to count the gang business of self-citation among the joke group of quasiscientists.
J-H He thanks in acknowledgements the “Program for New Century Excellent Talents at University”. What a waste of money and lack of self-respect for those who distribute such a grant!
Re: The Kind of Email I Don’t Need
This is just a typical abstract paper for one of the greatest member of E-infinity club namely Ji-Huan He and his company.
Hierarchy of wool fibers and its interpretation using E-infinity theory
Chaos, Solitons and Fractals,
In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 9 August 2008
Ji-Huan He, Zhong-Fu Ren, Jie Fan, Lan Xu
Abstract
Why do wool fibers show excellent advantages in warmth-retaining and many other practical properties? The paper concludes that their hierarchical structure is the key. Using E-infinity theory, its Hausdorff dimension is estimated to be about 4.2325, very close to El Naschie’s E-infinity dimension, 4.2360, revealing an optimal structure for wool fibers.
I suggest for the next time that author study tefal coating and how things can’t stick to it. And how this related to its fractal properties and in turn to its Hausdorff dimension. That is could be an amazing application of El naschie’s E-infinity theory.
Of course this can explain that El naschie is using anti-tefal to stick forever to Elsevier even if he has set to retire.
More stuff about El naschie can be found in www.elnaschiewatch.blogspot.com
Re: The Kind of Email I Don’t Need
Well at least if the second guy is right, we’ll know soon enough as he becomes the wealthiest man alive. Mostly off topic: really enjoyed your talk at UofI recently, it was a scream.