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fdr

I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics.

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex

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The h-index seems like much weaker metric than PageRank. For instance, consider 10 professors you decides to game this. They will create 100 fake papers and cite each other in all. Now suddenly they would have h-index of 100!

PageRank is recursive metric in graph. In above case, if above 10 professors don't have any other links pointing to them, they don't get ranked higher. PageRank was designed to eliminate scenarios like above.

It's amusing that Google Scholar doesn't use PageRank prominently instead of these weaker metrics.

Aren't there areas of scientific research where people doing genuinely valuable research don't get cited at all except within a closed community? I'd imagine e.g. that a handful of researchers all studying some obscure animal species would have a high h-index but a very low PageRank.

An experiment that did just that a few years ago:

"Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting" by Delgado Lopez-Cozar, et al.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638

[edit: grammar]

"weaker" metrics can be useful, because you can understand it better. If I tell you a PageRank of an author is 3.452. That means nothing to me. If I tell you somebody's h-index is 18. That means they published 18 papers that got 18 citations each. The h-index is useful for comparing people in the same field. There is also a metric for journals called impact factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

You can even do something similar at the city level and see which city is the most influential in Science (or physics in this case): http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01...

I wrote a quick script to generate a list similar to (but not as deep or well-annotated as) Prof Palsberg's.

https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3

It's a BFS for Google Scholar seeded with Herbert Simon.

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