Ranking scientists by their citations–the number of times they are mentioned in other scientists’ papers– is a miserable business. Everybody can point to ways in which this system is flawed:

* not all citations are equal. The importance of the citing paper is a significant factor
* scientists in different fields of study use citations in different ways. An average paper in the life sciences is cited about six times, three times in physics, and about once in mathematics.
* ground-breaking papers may be cited less often because a field is necessarily smaller in its early days.
* important papers often stop being cited when they are incorporated into textbooks

The pattern of citations between papers forms a complex network, not unlike the one the internet forms. Might that be a clue that point us towards a better way of assessing the merits of the papers that it consists of?

Sergei Maslov from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state and Sidney Redner at Boston University have asked themselves just that question and suggest that Google’s PageRank algorithm might throw some light on the matter.


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