Submission + - Crackpot scandal in mathematics (utexas.edu)
ocean_soul writes: "It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics, thanks mainly to Zoran Skoda (and also to John Baez, known from the This Week's Finds blog). The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the "scientific" journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of which in the latest issue. Like many crackpots El Nashie has a kind of cult around him, with another journal devoted to the praising of his greatness. There was also a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for El Naschie which was supposedly written by one of his followers. When it was deleted by Wikipedia they even threatened with legal actions (which never materialized)."
