Impact factor ranks Journals, not Authors or papers. I googled the original paper: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+page+rank+author%3

Impact factor ranks Journals, not Authors or papers. I googled the original paper: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+page+rank+author%3Apage&btnG= https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=the+p... (I do not want to link directly to the pdf shown in the search result). Section 2.1 deals with related work: "There has been a great deal of work on academic citation analysis [Gar95]. Go man [Gof71] has published an interesting theory of how information flow in a scienti c community is an epidemic process......" (and more) I think that paper is worth a read.