Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"There are a lot of people trying to use pagerank for academic journals, but so far it hasn't worked well for various reasons."

Apart from eigenfactor.org, what other examples do you know of?

I'm not aware of anyone using PageRank for individual articles. (I know this isn't what you were referring to in your comment).

I'd be interested to know what algorithm Google Scholar uses to compute its rankings. The rankings it returns seem to be pretty close to pure citation counts, with some minor variations, which could potentially be explained as being due to some sort of relevancy of the hit to the query.



There have been a bunch of papers over the years, with varying levels of success. Here's a short one that tries pagerank on a set of physics papers:

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/28/44/11103

Reading past the usual academic exaggeration (where everything is "promising" and "has potential"), the data is underwhelming -- there's no clear indication that pagerank has an advantage over traditional citation metrics.

Here's a Google cache link to a paper that discusses some of the things I was talking about (i.e. how the metaphor breaks down when moving from web to journals):

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:KdKSGivmckgJ:www.cais-a...

As I said, there have been lots of other papers. I don't recall seeing one that made a convincing case, but I'm certainly not an expert....




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: