A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.
The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan.
Atangana’s article, “Derivative with two fractional orders: A new avenue of investigation toward revolution in fractional calculus,” was published in The European Physical Journal Plus — where Atangana is an editor — on Oct. 24, 2016, and has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
PubPeer commenters flagged the paper last year, and concerns about the study were sent to Paolo Biscari, editor-in-chief of the journal, in late 2019, according to two sources familiar with the matter who wished to remain anonymous due to fears of retaliation.
Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that Biscari decided to retract the paper in May 2020, after it was reviewed by an adjudicating referee in response to those concerns. Now, more than eight months later, the journal has issued a retraction notice:
The Editor‐in‐Chief retracted this article [1] upon request of the Author. Following an investigation into the mathematical definitions contained in Section 2, the mathematical validity of the results (especially Theorem 1) contained in Section 3, and the physical applications presented in Section 6, the article was found to contain errors.
Author Abdon Atangana agrees to this retraction.
Biscari forwarded our requests for comment to a Springer Nature spokesperson, who said:
We opened an editorial investigation after concerns were raised by a reader. We conducted the investigation as we normally do, by rigorously applying COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines, and consulting the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group and an independent, subject-specific external expert before taking any final action.
Once our investigation was complete, we concluded that a retraction was the most appropriate course of action to ensure the integrity of the scientific record.
For confidentiality reasons we are unable to comment on the editorial history of the paper, or share details of the investigation. We treat all correspondence with the authors and reviewers as confidential and we prefer not to comment on anything that Professor Atangana may have said publicly elsewhere.
However, I would like to emphasise that our decision to retract the paper was based on an independent expert assessment of the scientific validity of the results alone. As stated in the retraction note, Professor Atangana agreed to the retraction of the article.
In response to critiques about the study on PubPeer, which first appeared in January 2020, Atangana explained that “some typos are made not by author but in the process of publication.” In additional comments on that website, Atangana also said that, “A correngidum [sic] was written to solve such problem and will be published soon.”
In an email to Retraction Watch, however, Atangana said that he had not been given an opportunity to correct the article.
This retraction is Atangana’s third. “New numerical method for ordinary differential equations: Newton polynomial,” published in July 2020 in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics and “A fractional model for predator-prey with omnivore,” published in the journal Chaos in January 2019, have also been retracted.
And as commenters pointed out in a Retraction Watch story that we posted in June 2019, Atangana was guest editor for a Focus Issue in the journal Chaos in which three different articles were ultimately retracted. One of those published papers, “Finite-time stability analysis of fractional differential systems with variable coefficients,” was pulled, according to the retraction notice, because it never went through an outside peer review.
Atangana isn’t the first researcher with multiple retractions to earn a “highly cited” award. In 2016, Bharat Aggarwal — currently 20th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 29 retractions — was named to Thomson Reuters’ (now Clarivate’s) list of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.
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Atangana’s comments on PubPeer are a case study of how concerns about flawed papers are often addressed by authors.
He initially states he will not respond on that forum, then continues to do so. Instead of answering questions, he accuses critics of bad motives. He complains about anonymous criticism. He claims the concerns posted by multiple anonymous commenters are really sock puppets of a nemesis. He claims the critics are wrong. He invokes the god of “peer review” to argue he does not need to defend his paper from post publication criticism. He claims any mistakes are inadvertent (typos) and not made by himself. He claims he has corresponding with the journal and they have agreed to publish a correction.
Then… a retraction with which he agrees. Would this have happened without PubPeer and the anons pushing for a correction?
Good news.
I will also highlight for the readers that Abdon Atangana is listed as editor at the low-quality Elsevier periodical Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/chaos-solitons-and-fractals/editorial-board
Starting ca. Oct. 2018 according to their published “Editorial Board” listings in issues:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077918309949
Then you can search for the papers published therein that have the name “Atangana” in their title, abstract or keywords, since Oct. 2018:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/search?pub=Chaos%2C%20Solitons%20%26%20Fractals&cid=271591&date=2018-2021&tak=Atangana
6 pages of results, at 25 per page = 150 papers in 3 years that stroke his ego by naming something after him in the title, abstract or author-specified keywords. I read a few of these 150 papers, and I can attest that they are 100% junk.
Perhaps this kind of corruption is of now surprise to those of us in the community because Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is the same journal of El Naschie infamy; see “Self-publishing editor set to retire” by Q. Schiermeier: https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081126/full/456432a.html
So it goes.
A retraction in mathematics is made because of erroneous statement(s), not because of faking data, plagiarism, or manipulation of an image. The responsibility for publication lies with reviewers & author. Any ethical lapse lies in the statements made by the author after the retraction.
Prof. Atantanga has a strong relationship with prof. Dumitru Baleanu (Cankaya University, Turkey). They introduced together the so-called Atangana-Baleanu derivative. Not only Atangana, as reported in the previous thought, but also Baleanu is able to produce an incredible number of papers: 1527 papers in his whole carrier, 166 papers in 2018, 179 papers in 2019 and 376 papers in 2020 (data taken from Scopus). This huge production of papers is not common in the field of mathematics; I think no other mathematician in the world has ever written more than a paper a day!. Baleanu is member of the editorial board of several journals in which publishes his papers.
Yes, these metrics are puzzling. The google scholar account of Dumitru Baleanu accumulates 1936 items over 30 years, that is 64 papers per year:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=EFO9iO4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Paul Erdös, probably the most prolific mathematician during the 20th century, co-authored only 1453 papers during his life, between 1932 and 1996 (I don’t count 72 posthumous papers). That is less than 23 papers per year. This is in line with the real productivity of the eccentric mathematician, who devoted his entire lifetime to maths, 24/24 and 365/365.
https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/Erdos-Number-Project/erdpubs.2010.pdf
Well, not so puzzling if one realizes that the papers on the GoogleScholar page (takes only a few minutes to click through a few of them) are trivial modifications of each other, often with elementary math errors (as in the 3 cases RW discusses in the post above).
Good heavens. The few mathematicians I have been privileged to know published about one article every two years or so.
Chaos, Solitons and Fractals has published 68 papers naming Atangana-Baleanu derivative in the title. In the majority of these papers a model originally proposed with the standard integer-order derivative is just reformulated by changing the integer-order derivative with this derivative and the plot of some solutions is shown. No physical motivations for this replacement are given.
There is not even an evidence that the new derivative better models the system of the phenomenon.
It looks like an automatic mechanism to produce papers.
Is there any peer review in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals in order to filter out weak papers?
I agree, see my comment above. It is just a paper mill.
It is my professional opinion that there isn’t much peer review at C,S&F. Neither in the early 2000s, when El Naschie was perpetrating his now-well-documented scientific fraud, nor now.
I submitted a letter to the editor of C,S&F on Oct. 3, 2020 about these matters. My letter is just 1 page of straightforward *mathematical* facts about the errors in the papers they’ve published. You might not be surprised to hear that my letter is still “with editor”, having never been sent for review, according to its status on Editorial Manager. I assume I will never heard back about its status, and they will not send it for review, because it highlights that the journal is sham. Well, I’ll highlight this fact here instead, then.
I had a similar experience with the journal Math. Model. Natural Phenom. (MMNP), published by EDP Science, when I discovered the paper “New numerical approach for fractional differential equations” https://doi.org/10.1051/mmnp/2018010 (the authors are A.Atangana and K.M.Owolabi).
This paper proposes a method based on completely unreliable ideas and provides a completely wrong analysis. Not subtle mistakes, but macroscopic errors which no undergraduate student should be allowed.
Since the advancement of science is made by research and correction of wrong results, as it is usual in these cases I wrote a comment note about this paper and submitted it to MMNP on August 28 2018. A couple of hours after my submission (I repeat, a couple of hours) I received from the Editor-In-Chief prof. Vitaly Volpert the editorial rejection of my comment with the following motivation “The journal publishes mainly topical issues. At the moment, there is no issue corresponding to the topic of your paper. I recommend you to submit it elsewhere. Please note that by returning this manuscript to you does not reflect, in any way, the quality of your paper.”
Basically, the content of my comment was not examined. Despite I was warning the journal of the several errors, the Editor-In-Chief seemed to not care about them.
Maybe the Editor-In-Chief is happier to have published a wrong paper in his journal than to give readers a correction of the wrong results. I understand that form a business point of view he has some reasons: this very flawed paper has now 106 citations on Scopus. But, obviously, this is not science.
Wow. Unbelievable. I thought it was generally agreed by publishers there must be a correction mechanism for the literature, such as comment papers.
By the way, that entire special issue in MMNP is low quality…
Hi Roberto, this is insane! It looks like that as long as MMNP does not open a topical issue specifically dedicated to illustrating errors in their previous papers, they will not publish any comment to inform readers about these errors. You should send your comment to some other journal.
Hi MM, this is exactly what I did. I reformulated the comment, in a more general perspective, and I submitted to CNSNS where it was published after usual peer-review.
A few months later I received a terribly retaliation. In a paper published in Chaos-AIP an author unfairly blamed me of having published fake and manipulated results! The blaming paper was in a Focus Issue edited by Atangana and Owolabi themselves and was accepted (apparently without revisions) in a very fast way.
Obviously, the allegations were unfounded, and the paper has been successively retracted.
Anyway, this shows the way in which these people react to critics.
You can find this story in http://retractionwatch.com/2019/06/06/chaos-as-chaos-retracts-paper-it-apparently-never-should-have-published-in-the-first-place/
And today, just 4 days after my reply above. The letter to the editor of C,S&F I submitted on Oct. 3, 2020, which never changed its editorial status from “with editor”, was rejected. The puzzling broken-English editorial decision did not include any peer reviewer comments. Curious timing, no? 🙂
Update! It appears the rejection without review was due to a renegade associate editor. Upon a very lengthy exchange with the Editor in Chief, and Elsevier representatives, the comment finally was sent out to impartial reviewers. They immediately concluded that the comment is substantive, important and correct.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960077921003532?via%3Dihub
Ergo, the paper being commented on is mathematically erroneous. Another nonsense Atangana-aggrandizing paper falls. Only 100+ other erroneous ones remain…
Well, having either Atangana or Baleanu on the editorial board is a big black quality mark for a journal. As everyone may check by their own eyes.
There are other people, who also recur as editors of these journals. I leave finding those to the community’s effort.
There is a fourth article by Abdon Atangana (with co-author J.F.Gómez-Aguilar) which has been retracted: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cam.2021.113609
Also this paper was commented in PubPeer https://pubpeer.com/publications/FB8EF49847E3B7E9ED43F6FEC5FAB7
It seems that the role of websites as RetractionWatch and PubPeer is becoming fundamental to discover bad science.
This author is such an expert in retractions (he as at least four papers retracted) that he now writes a paper in order to suggest publishers how to handle retractions
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03201385/
It’s a kind of a short-circuit.
I would’ve thought this was straight out of The Onion, but sadly it’s real. You can’t make it up…
A very similar paper has been published in https://advancesindifferenceequations.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13662-021-03494-7
In order to rebut critics towards derivatives with nonsingular kernel, the author proposes a model with a nonsingular kernel derivative …
Obviously … the prediction of this model are “the use of fractional differential and integral operators with nonsingular kernels will survive the test of time and would be massively utilized in all fields of science, technology, and engineering to find real-life solutions in spite of those very few papers being published against them”.
Be that good or not, the sewage pit also known as Springer’s journal “Advances in Difference Equations” is now being drained and filled with soil.
“Springer Nature is happy to announce a new chapter for Advances in Difference Equations. Starting July 1st, the journal will be transitioning to a new title that opens the scope of the journal to broader developments in theory and applications of models. Under the new title, Advances in Continuous and Discrete Models: Theory and Modern Applications, the journal will cover developments in machine learning, data driven modeling, differential equations, numerical analysis, scientific computing, control, optimization, and computing. The journal will also be led by three new Editors-in-Chief: Prof. Harbir Antil (George Mason University, Virginia), Prof. Xue-Cheng Tai (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong), and Prof. Enrique Zuazua (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany). Due to this transition, all new submissions received after 1st July will be considered for Advances in Continuous and Discrete Models, which will publish articles starting from 1 January 2022. Meanwhile, Advances in Difference Equations will be completing its last volume under the original aims & scope this year (2021).”
Although, keeping in mind the story of “Chaos, Solitons and Fractals”, I’m not very optimistic about the replacement journal.
I was astonished to find that Prof Baleanu has coauthored with a leading professor at Cambridge University (albeit the fellow who announced he’d proved the Lindelof Hypothesis but didn’t deliver), and that no less a figure than a Cambridge Senior Wrangler has published papers in the Atangana-Baleanu universe.
Analysis of a few randomly selected pages from Atangana’s papers suggests that as well as making frequent mathematical errors he runs at about 8 English language errors every 10 sentences – a rate that surely calls for a descriptor such as “semi-literate”.
Somewhere along the line, questions have to be asked about Springer.
According to this page
https://betatinz.com/abdon-atangana/
Abdon Atangana is “one of the best scientists in the world”. He is also said to have “an h index of 53 on Google Scholar”. That means he has authored 53 articles each of which have gathered at least 53 citations.
But that information is out of date, because Google appear to have taken his Google Scholar page down. So at the moment an accurate statement would be that he does not have an h-index at Google Scholar.
Google have not taken down Dumitru Baleanu’s. Prof Baleanu has had 54963 citations, including 44235 since 2016 – a rate of at 20 per day for the past six years.
For comparison, Terry Tao has “only” had 37505 citations in the same time period. And according to the graph at Google Scholar Prof Tao’s numbers are decreasing, whereas Prof Baleanu’s are headed for the sky.
Surely the Atangana-Baleanu balloon must burst some time soon? This is just totally ridiculous.
At least Google seem to be appearing to see sense.
The number of Atangana’s papers which have been retracted must be continuously updated. Here is a recent further one https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/num.23016 The paper belongs to a special issue but there is no information about possible guest editors.
It can be appear utmost surprising, but despite his 6 retracted papers, prof. Atangana has been awarded with 50.000 dollars from UNESCO
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/five-trailblazers-win-unesco-ai-fozan-international-prize-promotion-young-scientists
How UNESCO could ignore that his papers are retracted or strongly criticized, as it happens for instance on Pubpeer
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22Abdon+Atangana%22 ?
And how it is possible that UNESCO ignored that National Research Foundation of South Africa (the major funding institution in Atangana’s country) does not include him in the list of rated researchers?