Comment on the New York Times Article

This is from Paul Wouters at CWTS, Leiden University

"However, the reason for this high position is the performance of exactly one (1) academic: Mohamed El Naschie, who published 323 articles in the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals of which he is the founding editor. His articles frequently cite other articles in the same journal by the same author. On many indicators, the Alexandrian university does not score very high, but on the number of citations indicator the university scores 99.8 which puts it as the 4th most highly cited in the world. This result clearly does not make any sense at all. Apparently, the methodology used by the THES is not only problematic because it puts a high weight on surveys and perceived reputation. It is also problematic because the way the THES survey counts citations and makes them comparable across fields (in technical terms, the way these counts are normalized) is not able to filter out these forms of self-promotion by self-citations. In other words: the way the THES uses citation analysis does not meet one of the requirements of sound indicators: robustness against simple forms of manipulation."

BTW, to be a bit pedantic, it's not THES any more.