Abstract: We apply the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893--2003. While the Google number and the number of citations for each publication are positively correlated, outliers from this linear relation identify some exceptional papers or "gems" that are universally familiar to physicists.
From the body of the paper:
We believe that protocols based on the Google
PageRank algorithm hold a great promise for quantify-
ing the impact of scientific publications. They provide
a meaningful extension to traditionally-used importance
measures, such as the number of citation of individual ar-
ticles and the impact factor for journals as a whole. The
PageRank algorithm implements, in an extremely simple
way, the reasonable notion that citations from more im-
portant publications should contribute more to the rank
of the cited paper than those from less important ones.
Other ways of attributing a quality for a citation would
require much more detailed contextual information about
the citation itself....One meaningful difference between the WWW and citation networks is that citation
links cannot be updated after publication, while WWW
hyperlinks keep evolving together with the webpage containing them. Thus scientific papers and their citations
tend to age much more rapidly than active webpages.
These differences could be tak[en] into account by explicitly incorporating the effects of aging into the Page Rank
algorithm.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2006 10:19:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
