Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere – and the Gmail address Templeton used as contact information no longer works. (There is a Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, but no Glen Liberty.)
Ayman Samy Abdel-Khalik, the editor of the journal, did not respond to our requests for comment. But Abdon Atangana, whose work was the subject of the paper and who handled the paper’s peer review as guest lead editor of a special issue, said the manuscript had been read by “many people” before publication and that “the analysis presented in the paper was novel.”
Atangana, who has been named a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics and has had six papers retracted, also forwarded us a request from Templeton dated June 2020 using the same Gmail address:
Unfortunately, it has not been published yet because there are complications around the rights agreement. When I submitted the article, I was under the impression that the journal was without page fees (because the website at the time explained that the fees would be subsidized by Alexandria University). However, it seems as if this policy has since changed and they now expect me to pay a $650 fee, which I cannot afford becasue I am a PhD candidate without a grant.
Eight of the paper’s 25 references are to works by Atangana.
Atangana said that following our inquiries, he has sent a few emails to Elsevier, the publisher of the journal, and would update us with anything he learned.
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Outstanding investigative reporting. Anyone who has searched the A-word on pubpeer knows this is not the first, nor hardly the last, investigation that will have to be undertaken of this so-called field of study.
Usually with papers published with fake author names, it is difficult to suss out the motivation or guess who the real author is. Goodness, who on Earth would publish a paean to author Abdon Atangana under a fake name?
Inexplicable things often happen around the names of Atangana and Baleanu.
In this article on the Turkish press
https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2022/yazarlar/sultan-ucar/akademide-the-end-6915946/
(google translator is necessary for those who are not familiar with Turkish language) it is reported an interesting investigation on the anomalous number of works by Baleanu (in Scopus they are 373 in 2020, 285 in 2021 and 94 in the first part of 2022).
!! According to that article, the 25-year-old University of Cankaya is the only university in Turkey to be listed by Times Higher Education in its top 500. Since THE started ranking universities 14 years ago, Cankaya has had 1432 articles published…of which 846 have been by Prof Baleanu.
Lest that make you think he’s been producing them at a steady rate of about 60 per year, though, the journalist points out that he has actually got up to a rate of about 1 per day.
How much longer can this go on?
Surely it won’t be long before someone who can do something about it notices?
I think that everybody finds its convenience in this distorted mechanism. Cankaya University improves its ranking. Baleanu receives some awards for his prolific activity. Journals receive more citations and increase their Impact Factor. Co-authors are facilitated in publishing their papers.
It should be in charge of Academic Editors to stop that. Unfortunately most of them do not take any action. Just Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis (which is the main journal in Fractional Calculus, the research field of Baleanu) no longer has Baleanu in its Editorial Board.
I am not a mathematician and most of the actual information here goes way over my head (at the time being). However, I’ve only gotten through maybe four of the Pubpeer comments on papers by Atangana and I’m starting to get the impression that the author is the mathematical equivalent of a person who is trying to sell a free energy scam.
Templeton? Isn’t that the name of the rat in Charlotte’s Web?
The publisher Elsevier’s name keeps dropping up as in charge of these dubious sources.
Time they did some detective work.
It appears the journal is “hosted” by Elsevier. That is, it is not an official Elsevier journal, but gets help from Elsevier.
I’m the first year PhD student. It was quite a shock for me to realize there was someone doing this kind of things, and the journal didn’t review the identity before publishing the article. I think the journal review system needs to be more rigorous.
When you say “I’m the first year PhD student”, do you mean you are the person who wrote the words which according to this article Prof Atangana attributed to the elusive Alexander Templeton?
So what is happening here? Is this guy creating a fake paper with fake authors to pump his own citations? And he is doing that on the same journal he is the editor of? C’mon, how low can you go?
I believe people are going to think it was me publishing this but it’s not. I use Linear Algebra mostly for game design. I have hardly any use for calculus. I don’t even know what bibliometric means lol. I would be the guy in the Scottsbluff area that suffers from multiple personality disorder. None of my personalities that knew / know math care too much for calculus. I think someone in my town is hiding behind me in a weird way making indirect references to try and pin this on me. I use to live in Glendale AZ, my name is Charles. Anything published by this person is probably fake. I didn’t look too much into it but from a glance, I’m going with fake. There’s no credible / advanced mathematicians, including myself and any of my personalities, that reside in the Scottsbluff area that I’m aware of.
For what it’s worth, a listing at Researchgate that includes as an item a reference to the “Bibliometric Analysis” article suggests that its supposed author Alexander Templeton has an affiliation with Glen Oaks Community College, in Michigan, USA. At least I think that’s what is being said. The page is entitled “Glen Oaks Community College” and under “Recent Publications” it lists several articles, one of which is the bibliometric analysis one asserted to have been single-authored by Alexander Templeton.
https://www.researchgate.net/institution/Glen-Oaks-Community-College
Prof Atangana has a page at Wikipedia where it is stated that he ranked [sic] “number one in the world in mathematics”, “number one in Africa in all the fields”, and “number 186 in the world in all the fields”. This is sourced to something called “the Stanford list of 2% single-year table”, referred to in a webpage on a site run by the University of the Free State in South Africa.
A close comparison of the types of language error apparent in the Wikipedia article, the UFS article, and Prof Atangana’s numerous published papers may prove useful.
I browsed to the Wikipedia page for Abdon Atangana but it has been proposed for deletion.
I don’t contribute to Wikipedia and so am not familiar with procedures there, but I understand that the article was proposed for deletion before, and indeed it actually was deleted, but now it has been created again. Goodness knows how that was allowed to happen.
There are 14 possible reasons for deletion of a Wikipedia page. One is insufficient notability. The page in question has been deleted for a second time, on that basis. There is a process for that and you caught at least a glimpse of it in the request for deletion template affixed to the page at the time of your visit.
As to your final remark, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recreation_of_previously_deleted_pages
for a full explanation (from a policy perspective).
Thanks. I have now read the deletion log and the person who wanted the article retained seemed furious to the point of incoherence.
According to a page published this week at Independent Online (IOL), a South African news site, Professor Atangana has now been ranked “the world’s 2nd-best mathematician”. His jacket in the accompanying photo, like the gown or cape he was wearing in the Wikipedia article, has mathematical statements written on it.
https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/free-state/meet-sas-professor-abdon-atangana-who-has-been-ranked-the-worlds-2nd-best-mathematician-bae9dc28-ee0b-4446-8d0f-24f2d2bc9132
After he was listed by Stanford in the 1% of most highly cited researchers, Professor Atangana gave a TV interview. He says he predicted the second Covid wave in Europe. He also says he was inspired by the Egyptian pyramids and the realisation that it was African people who were the world’s first to use mathematics to solve real world problems. But the Egyptian pyramids don’t show any such thing. He cites quantity of citations a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqpWP7mV4YA