“The International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation (IJNSNS) has dominated the impact-factor charts in the “Mathematics, Applied” category. It took first place in each year 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, generally by a wide margin, and came in second in 2005. However, IJNSNS is nowhere near the top of its field. Thus we set out to understand the origin of its large impact factor. In 2008 IJNSNS had an impact factor of 8.91 in ISI’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The second and third highest impact factors, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics (CPAM) and SIAM Review (SIREV), only have impact factors of 3.69 and 2.80, respectively, in 2008. Both journals have a reputation for excellence.”
The making of the high impact factor of IJNSNS.
“The top-citing author to IJNSNS in 2008 was the journal’s editor-in-chief, Ji-Huan He, who cited the journal (within the two-year window) 243 times. The second top citer, D. D. Ganji, with 114 cites, is also a member of the editorial board, as is the third, regional editor Mohamed El Naschie, with 58 cites. Together these three account for 29% of the citations counted toward the impact factor. For comparison, the top three citers to SIREV contributed only 7, 4, and 4 citations, respectively, accounting for less than 12% of the counted citations, and none of these authors is involved in editing the journal. For CPAM the top three citers (9, 8, and 8) contributed about 7% of the citations and, again, were not on the editorial board.”
“Citations to IJNSNS are concentrated within the two-year window used in the impact factor calculation. The 2008 citations to articles published since 2000 shows that 16% of the citations to CPAM fell within that two-year window and only 8% of those to SIREV did; in contrast, 71.5% of the 2008 citations to IJNSNS fell within the two-year window. A single issue of the Journal of Physics: Conference Series provided the greatest number of IJNSNS citations, 294 citations accounting for more than 20% of its impact factor. This issue was the proceedings of a conference organized by IJNSNS editor-in-chief He at his home university. He was responsible for the peer review of the issue. The second top-citing journal for IJNSNS was Topological Methods in Nonlinear Analysis, which contributed 206 citations (14%), again with all citations coming from a single issue. This was a special issue with Ji-Huan He as the guest editor; his co-editor, Lan Xu, is also on the IJNSNS editorial board. J.-H. Continuing down the list of IJNSNS high-citing journals, another similar circumstance comes to light: 50 citations from a single issue of the Journal of Polymer Engineering (which, like IJNSNS, is published by Freund), guest edited by the same pair, Ji-Huan He and Lan Xu. However, third place is held by the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, with 154 citations spread over numerous issues. In 2008 Ji-Huan He served on the editorial board of CS&F, and its editor-in-chief was Mohamed El Naschie, who was also a coeditor of IJNSNS. In a highly publicized case, the entire editorial board of CS&F was recently replaced, but El Naschie remained coeditor of IJNSNS.http://sciencewatch.com/inter/aut/2008/08-apr/08aprHe/
His citation record in the Web of Science includes 137 papers cited a total of 3,193 times to date.” He was cited by ESI for the “Hottest Research of 2007–8” and again for the “Hottest Research of 2009”. The h-index is another popular citation-based metric for researchers, intended to measure productivity as well as impact. An individual’s h-index is the largest number such that many of his or her papers have been cited at least that many times. J.-H. He claims an h-index of 39, while Hirsch estimated the median for Nobel prize winners in physics to be 35.
You can read all about Mohamed El Naschie and Ji-Huan He on my blog, El Naschie Watch.
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