El Naschie vs.Nature

The journal Nature has been totally vindicated. The judgement by Mrs Victoria Sharp has dismissed El Naschie's claims. I would be very surprised if there has ever been a more unambiguous judgement .

To review the case, at the end of 2008 Nature published an article, Self-publishing editor set to retire, which described how Mohamed El Naschie, the editor of the applied mathematics/theoretical physics journal, Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, had published an unusually large number of his own papers, which were of poor quality, without proper peer review. Furthermore, the journal had acquired a falsely high impact factor through self-citation and citation by a limited number of friends and disciples.

El Naschie sued Nature and author Quirin Schiermeier for libel. Now, Mrs Justice Sharp has found for the defendants.

The case is of interest to this blog since it was the citation of El Naschie's papers by himself and a few associates that contributed to  Alexandria University's reaching fourth place for research impact in the 2010 Times Higher Education (THE) World university Rankings, powered by Thomson Reuters (TR). El Naschie did not, of course, do it all by himself. TR's methodology inflated his citations because they were recent, because they were assigned to a low citing field, applied maths, and becuse he was affiliated to a university in a low citing region. Since then TR has tweaked its citation indicator to avoid the repetition of such a strange result.

This is a victory for academic freedom although one wonders what would have happened if El Naschie had chosen a critic with a less substantial bank account.

Here are some comments. First place goes to El Naschie Watch which has been following the affairs of EL Naschie for some time.

El Naschie Watch

Nature

BBC News

New Scientist

Guardian

Times Higher Education