I read this book in the early 90s: http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification-Cataloging/dp/019509395X http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research

I read this book in the early 90s: http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification-Cataloging/dp/019509395X http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification... The gist of it was that the "value" of a scholarly article could be measured by the number of citations, weighted by the number of citations each of the articles that cited it got, and so on. Basically PageRank (though without the actual mathematics that to calculate the number).