Will Alexandria University Make a Comeback?

In 2010 the first edition of the new model Times Higher Education  World University Rankings -- powered by Thomson Reuters -- caused amusement and consternation by placing Alexandria University in fourth place for research impact and in the world's top 200 overall.

This extraordinary achievement was entirely the result of the writings of one man, Dr Mohamed El Naschie "of" several universities, one of which was Alexandria University. By citing himself and being cited by others for papers published in a field in which there normally few citations, especially in the first two years after publication, El Naschie pushed the university into a huge score for citation impact.

Anyone interested in the El Naschie story can consult the blog El Naschie Watch. An appraisal of his work's scientific merit can be found in the legal  judgement in 2012 of Mrs Justice Sharp.

In 2011 TR tweaked the citations indicator a bit and managed to get Alexandria's citations score down to 61.4, which was still massively disproportionate to its score for research and its overall score. Then in 2012 it disappeared from the top 400 altogether.

Still the university did not give in. Like an ageing boxer trying for ever more obscure titles, Alexandria showed up in 93rd place in the 2013 THE BRICS and Emerging Economies rankings with a still creditable 31.5 for citations. That score of course represented citations of El Naschie's papers in the years up to 2009 after which he stopped publishing in Web of Science journals. One would expect the score to dwindle further as the number of his countable papers diminished year by year.

It seemed that Alexandria was destined to fade away into the legions of the unranked universities of the world. After his month of wonders in September 2009 when he published eight papers in a single issue of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, El Naschie published nothing in indexed journals in 2010, 2011 or 2012.

But in July 2013 El Naschie had a paper in the Russian journal Gravitation and Cosmology. Eleven out of 31 cited references were to his own works. That could be a useful boost for Alexandria. However, the paper so far remains uncited.

El Naschie gave Alexandria University as his affiliation and reprint address although the email address appears to be a relic of his days as editor of Chaos Solitons and Fractals.

Will there be more indexed papers from El Naschie? Will Alexandria return to the world rankings?