Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Chronicles of Extreme Publishing


Two items:

  1. El Naschie loses his case against Nature.

    Short version: As chief editor of a journal, the man published tons of papers that were widely deemed to be of very poor quality. A Nature story on his retirement, and raised doubts about the peer review process for the man's papers. The man sued Nature for libel and lost.

    In a section headed “The implausible absence of documentation”, the ruling also says that El Naschie “failed to provide any documentary evidence whatever that his papers were the subject of peer review”. The ruling states, “I am satisfied that his papers were not the subject of any, or any proper, peer review at all.”

    Back when the scandal broke, Arunn had a couple of link-filled posts on l'affaire El Naschie.

  2. A New Record in Retractions

    An inquiry panel in Japan has recommended retraction of over 170 papers by Yoshitaka Fujii. [See also: Retraction Watch posts Report: Fujii faked data in at least 172 papers and Does anesthesiology have a problem? Final version of report suggests Fujii will take retraction record, with 172]

    Thanks to Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi for the e-mail alert.

3 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    You should start preparing to receive hateful comments from the legion of El Naschie supporters on the internet. :-)

    I had a post on the 'dude' before I shut down my blog. I just received a huge number of almost spam-like comments that threatened legal action against me for speaking against an "eminent scientist". Of course, venom of religious kind too, with people cursing me as an 'infidel' and what not.

  2. Abi said...

    @Jatkesha: The comment thread at Nature is where the action is -- check it out!

  3. Anonymous said...

    This is looking rather suspicious. Most of the comments supporting El Naschie on the Nature site seem to be from a small group of commentors (I noticed only two distinct names in my quick scroll down). I tried to Google search one of them (Rajeev Sindan), and it seems, even though the name does not read like a pseudonym, that he exists only in comments on blog posts about El Naschie. Now I wouldn't think these people are sock puppets: they would be rather foolish to give Nature further ammunition by posting from the same IP, but then who are they?