PageRank might be better way to evaluate quality. It too can be gamed. Maybe not as easily, though.
In a very loose sense, PR is the same algorithm universities use, evaluate quality of some content based on the number of references to that content.
It is definitely gamed in similar ways. I'm surprised we haven't seen professors hire SEO firms to help increase citation counts of their research.
In fact PageRank was inspired by academic rankings in that aspect:
"PageRank was influenced by citation analysis, early developed by Eugene Garfield in the 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Hyper Search, developed by Massimo Marchiori at the University of Padua. In the same year PageRank was introduced (1998), Jon Kleinberg published his work on HITS. Google's founders cite Garfield, Marchiori, and Kleinberg in their original papers."
Carl Bergstrom is a smart guy so I suppose the practical implementation of the above must have some wrinkles, but with enough brute force it seems tractable. What I despise more than anything is the gaming that takes place for “impact factor”.
I do OK by standard metrics but would very much like to know where I stand by less easily gamed metrics of influence.
And suddenly Google is the authoritative source on literally everything in the world. I hope you like their political views, because they would become "the one".