Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google's PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks

摘要

The number of citations is the most commonly used metric for quantifying the importance of scientific publications. However, we all have anecdotal experiences that citations alone do not characterize the importance of a publication. Some of the shortcomings of using citations as a universal measure of importance include the following. It ignores the importance of citing papers: a citation from an obscure paper is given the same weight as a citation from a ground-breaking and highly cited work. The number of citations is ill suited to compare the impact of papers from different scientific fields. Due to factors such as size of a field and disparate citation practices, the average number of citations per paper varies widely between disciplines. An average paper is cited ?times in life sciences, 3 times in physics, and <1 times in mathematics.