The publication record of Sayed Mohamed Eldin

In a twitter post Nick Wise (aka @nickwizzo) posted about Sayed Mohamed Eldin of Future University in Egypt. We thought we would take a look ourselves.

1. The author appears to go via several names. This may be a cultural thing and may not be trying to deceive. On the DSDimensions page that Nick refers to, the names given are Sayed Mohamed Eldin, El Sayed Tag Eldin, Elsayed Mohamed Tag-Eldin, Sayed M Eldin, Sayed M El Din, El Sayed M Tag El Din and El Sayed Mohamed Tag-Eldin.
2. As noted by Nick Wise, Eldin has published quite a number of papers in 2022 and 2023. We looked on Scopus. Searching for his name, like point 1, a number of names were returned but we managed to get an author id (57925959400). The figures we report here are from a Scopus search (‘AU-ID(57925959400)‘).
3. In 2022, Eldin published 61 papers and in 2023 (so far, our Twitter post was 26 Nov 2024 – updated figures are below) he has published 377 papers. He has not published any papers before that. Note, these are Scopus indexed papers.
4. A personal comment is that we have never come across anybody who starts publishing in a given year and publishes more than 60 papers.

   In fact, he published a paper every 5.98 days.

   Is it really possible for somebody to publish a peer reviewed scientific paper every six days, whilst adhering to the usual/expected guidelines for authorship?
   
5. In 2023, Eldin has published 377 papers. This year, we have had 329 days (up to 25 Nov 2023). This means that Eldin has published more than one paper every day (in fact 1.14 papers every day).

   We ask the same question – Is it really possible for somebody to publish more than one peer reviewed scientific paper every day, whilst adhering to the usual/expected guidelines for authorship?

6. The top three publishers are Elsevier Ltd. (112), Elsevier B.V. (62) and MDPI (57).

   It would be really interesting if these publishers could show us the “author record” for all the papers where Eldin is an author. There may not be anything wrong, but it would be interesting to look at the data.

   We are in no doubt that the publishers will not give us access to this data.

7. The top three journals that Eldin has published in are Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (74 papers), Scientific Reports (38 papers) and Journal of Materials Research and Technology (21 papers).
8. Many (if not all of the papers) are published as #OpenAccess. It would be interesting to see how many of the papers are open access (we may do that analysis, but it is not as easy as, perhaps, it should be).

   But, let’s assume that they were all open access and the average article processing fee (#APC) was $USD 1,000 (this will be a large underestimate).

   This means that Eldin (and his co-authors) have spent $USD 438,000 on the 438 papers he has published.

   We have two questions:

   i) We wonder who actually paid the APCs? Did it come from a single source or were they spread across many different sources?
   ii) We also wonder whether APCs provide the funders a good return on their investment? Would the, approaching, half a million dollars be better spent funding actual research, rather than paying to publish the results of the research?