This is such a pointed reference that I can't tell if you're just being ironic.

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.

Err, isn't PageRank almost the same as "citations"?

No, because it counts citations from influential papers with a higher weight.

That's the same with academic scores. Citations in the "Self-published journal of amateur chiropractors" don't buy you much academic credit...

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."

Isn't that how is done in academic circles? Maybe not quantatively but qualitatively surely tenure boards or hiring boards or student applicants notice such things.

I think this is a neat idea. Basically, you'd get more "credit" if you're cited by a good paper than if you're cited by a bad paper.

Aka eigenfactor

My understanding is that eigenfactor rates journals, not individual papers, so if somehow you get low-quality (whatever you want that to mean) papers into nature it has no independent way to realize that your specific paper is low quality. Also eigenfactor is biased towards favoring larger journals, which is not obviously a good thing. It would honestly be really cool if someone did page rank for individual papers. It seems like a much saner metric than anything that is currently used.

Oh good grief you’re right. This is doubly sad because using an ensemble metric for per-author eigenfactor seems like it would be tractable.

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.

> PageRank might be better way to evaluate quality

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".

Pagerank is referring to the graph algorithm known as pagerank, not anything provided specifically by Google.

"PageRank" is a Google trademark, and also the subject of a patent belonging to Stanford University and licensed exclusively to Google.

That patent expired.