You can love math, but can you math love?
Scientific Reports has retracted a 2023 paper that tried to do just that by imposing a numerical model onto an ancient Persian love story that may have influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The paper, “A fractional order nonlinear model of the love story of Layla and Majnun,” was written by Zulqurnain Sabir and Salem Ben Said, both mathematicians at United Arab Emirates University. The article has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
According to the abstract:
In this study, a fractional order mathematical model using the romantic relations of the Layla and Majnun is numerically simulated by the Levenberg–Marquardt backpropagation neural networks. The fractional order derivatives provide more realistic solutions as compared to integer order derivatives of the mathematical model based on the romantic relationship of the Layla and Majnun.
As Gram Parsons might have said, love hurts – causing headaches for Scientific Reports, which appears to have been on autoplay for this one.
According to the retraction notice:
The Editors have retracted this Article because of concerns regarding the originality and scientific validity of this work.
An investigation conducted after its publication confirmed that it contains material that substantially overlaps with1. Furthermore, concerns were raised about nonsensical content. The Editors therefore no longer have confidence in the research presented in this work.
Both Authors disagree with the retraction.
In other words, not only was the paper duplicative – a fact that could easily have been detected with some screening – it’s gobbledygook – a fact that also could easily have been detected with some peer review.
Said, the corresponding author, did not respond to a request for comment.
As it happens, attempts by researchers to mathematize love, including that between Layla and Majnun – are more common than one might expect, especially if one expected that number to approach zero.
One of those scholars is Clint Sprott, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The retracted article cites several of Sprott’s papers on romantic modeling, including a 2016 work in Nonlinear Dynamics titled “Layla and Majnun: a complex love story”.
Sprott told us he’d been unaware of the article and retraction:
The mathematical modeling of romantic relationships has an interesting history.
Originally Steve Strogatz used a simple toy model of love to motivate his students to learn about differential equations, and he included the model in his popular textbook on Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Various people (including me) were intrigued by the idea and extended it in various ways to capture common behaviors such as chaos without taking the results too seriously.
Every year or so someone publishes a new extension, each getting a bit more silly than the previous. The subject is fun to think about, and the papers do get a fair bit of attention, but I don’t think they have contributed much to the advance of social psychology. At best, the application of the mathematics to romance is whimsical and metaphorical.
Rafal Marszalek, the chief editor of Scientific Reports, told us, through a spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes the journal:
We became aware of concerns with this paper in September 2023 and began an investigation looking into them carefully following our established processes. This included seeking expert advice from our Editorial Board.
Marszalek added the journal runs plagiarism checks on all submissions:
However, the paper with substantial material overlap cited in the retraction notice was published after the retracted paper was submitted to the journal, which will have reduced the effectiveness of the tools used for detecting duplicated content.
Our submission policies outline our expectations for authors regrading duplicated material, and given the investigation concluded that this paper substantially overlapped with another paper, retraction was the appropriate course of action.
The investigation also highlighted elements of nonsensical material in the paper, which added to the decision to retract.
Could peer reviewers – or editors, for that matter – have caught that nonsense prior to publication? Marszalek demurred:
I’m afraid we cannot comment on the specifics of the peer review process for this or any other paper.
But in a 2022 interview, Marszalek tipped readers to the possibility that his journal was unafraid to operate at the edges of perspicuity:
we have the ability to put the weirdest and yet most wonderful piece of knowledge in the hands of a curious child somewhere out there, and to inspire them to do something that will change the world one day.
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