7 ms·

It strikes me that you can use faculty publications and PageRank algorithm to assign a score to each faculty member. Then you can actually find out which univer

by sytelus 12y ago

It strikes me that you can use faculty publications and PageRank algorithm to assign a score to each faculty member. Then you can actually find out which university has the strongest CS department. You can extend this to may be other fields to rank universities for each major and replace things like Patersons guide and other university ranking systems which are rather arbitrary.

fdr 12y ago
I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics. http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex
- shazeline 12y ago
  I wrote a quick script to generate a list similar to (but not as deep or well-annotated as) Prof Palsberg's. https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 It's a BFS for Google Scholar seeded with Herbert Simon.
- sytelus 12y ago
  The h-index seems like much weaker metric than PageRank. For instance, consider 10 professors you decides to game this. They will create 100 fake papers and cite each other in all. Now suddenly they would have h-index of 100! PageRank is recursive metric in graph. In above case, if above 10 professors don't have any other links pointing to them, they don't get ranked higher. PageRank was designed to eliminate scenarios like above. It's amusing that Google Scholar doesn't use PageRank prominently instead of these weaker metrics.
  - avar 12y ago
    Aren't there areas of scientific research where people doing genuinely valuable research don't get cited at all except within a closed community? I'd imagine e.g. that a handful of researchers all studying some obscure animal species would have a high h-index but a very low PageRank.
  - eegilbert 12y ago
    An experiment that did just that a few years ago: "Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting" by Delgado Lopez-Cozar, et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 [edit: grammar]
  - Anon84 12y ago
    You can even do something similar at the city level and see which city is the most influential in Science (or physics in this case): http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01640.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01...
  - warrenmar 12y ago
    "weaker" metrics can be useful, because you can understand it better. If I tell you a PageRank of an author is 3.452. That means nothing to me. If I tell you somebody's h-index is 18. That means they published 18 papers that got 18 citations each. The h-index is useful for comparing people in the same field. There is also a metric for journals called impact factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
warrenmar 12y ago
PageRank was originally designed for this purpose.
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - e_modad 12y ago
    I think warrenmar is referring to the fact a paper's impact can be measured by counting the number of times other authors cite the original paper. IIRC, Larry and Sergey used that idea as the conceptual framework behind PageRank. Indeed, they were right: the relevance of a search result can be increased tremendously by indexing as many pages as possible and then calculating how many people are linking to said page. They don't do it like that anymore but that's the basic idea.
  - warrenmar 12y ago
    The original funding Larry got was from the Digital Library Initiative. Then the web blew up. Maybe I shouldn't say PageRank was designed for citations, but that is where it draws its influence from. Things don't magically pop out of no where. But if you look at the PageRank algorithm, it looks like it is designed for paper citations. As a graduate student, you start a some place and you end up at a different place from where you intended to end up. My point is that one shouldn't be surprised to see that PageRank would work well for paper citations. http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - aidanf 12y ago
    PageRank evolved from Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities[1], which partly evolved from work in ranking research papers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
delian66 12y ago
I wonder what the equivalent of link farms and spam in such a system would be ?
- chrismaeda 12y ago
  The Information Systems literature.
- streptomycin 12y ago
  Self citation and publishing very similar articles multiple times. Both are already problems, since they work well to game many currently used citation metrics.

by sytelus 12y ago

fdr 12y ago

I think you may be interested in the "h-index" and related metrics. http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex http://researchguides.uic.edu/hindex

shazeline 12y ago
I wrote a quick script to generate a list similar to (but not as deep or well-annotated as) Prof Palsberg's. https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 https://gist.github.com/shazeline/d9881d06be31a59a93d3 It's a BFS for Google Scholar seeded with Herbert Simon.
sytelus 12y ago
The h-index seems like much weaker metric than PageRank. For instance, consider 10 professors you decides to game this. They will create 100 fake papers and cite each other in all. Now suddenly they would have h-index of 100! PageRank is recursive metric in graph. In above case, if above 10 professors don't have any other links pointing to them, they don't get ranked higher. PageRank was designed to eliminate scenarios like above. It's amusing that Google Scholar doesn't use PageRank prominently instead of these weaker metrics.
- avar 12y ago
  Aren't there areas of scientific research where people doing genuinely valuable research don't get cited at all except within a closed community? I'd imagine e.g. that a handful of researchers all studying some obscure animal species would have a high h-index but a very low PageRank.
- eegilbert 12y ago
  An experiment that did just that a few years ago: "Manipulating Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics: simple, easy and tempting" by Delgado Lopez-Cozar, et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638 [edit: grammar]
- Anon84 12y ago
  You can even do something similar at the city level and see which city is the most influential in Science (or physics in this case): http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01640.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130410/srep01640/full/srep01...
- warrenmar 12y ago
  "weaker" metrics can be useful, because you can understand it better. If I tell you a PageRank of an author is 3.452. That means nothing to me. If I tell you somebody's h-index is 18. That means they published 18 papers that got 18 citations each. The h-index is useful for comparing people in the same field. There is also a metric for journals called impact factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

warrenmar 12y ago

PageRank was originally designed for this purpose.

pjbrunet 12y ago
Care to elaborate?
- e_modad 12y ago
  I think warrenmar is referring to the fact a paper's impact can be measured by counting the number of times other authors cite the original paper. IIRC, Larry and Sergey used that idea as the conceptual framework behind PageRank. Indeed, they were right: the relevance of a search result can be increased tremendously by indexing as many pages as possible and then calculating how many people are linking to said page. They don't do it like that anymore but that's the basic idea.
- warrenmar 12y ago
  The original funding Larry got was from the Digital Library Initiative. Then the web blew up. Maybe I shouldn't say PageRank was designed for citations, but that is where it draws its influence from. Things don't magically pop out of no where. But if you look at the PageRank algorithm, it looks like it is designed for paper citations. As a graduate student, you start a some place and you end up at a different place from where you intended to end up. My point is that one shouldn't be surprised to see that PageRank would work well for paper citations. http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- aidanf 12y ago
  PageRank evolved from Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities[1], which partly evolved from work in ranking research papers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

delian66 12y ago

I wonder what the equivalent of link farms and spam in such a system would be ?

chrismaeda 12y ago
The Information Systems literature.
streptomycin 12y ago
Self citation and publishing very similar articles multiple times. Both are already problems, since they work well to game many currently used citation metrics.