this is almost pagerank for academic publications, and would probably be improved by being more like pagerank (where it also took into account how often citing papers were cited)
There are a lot of people trying to use pagerank for academic journals, but so far it hasn't worked well for various reasons.
Part of the problem is that the metaphor breaks down: a paper is like an individual webpage, but a journal is like a company -- it has a much longer time-line, and its impact varies over time. Also, unlike web links, citations don't go away; they just accumulate over time. Since the point of these citation metrics are to rate the journals (and maybe the scientists), pagerank has some difficulties in the domain. It works better for ranking individual papers than for scientists or their journals.
This shouldn't be too surprising: TechCrunch (for example) probably has a good rank on many pages, but pagerank doesn't tell us anything about Michael Arrington's reputation.
But we're not talking about ranking journals. We're talking about ranking authors. JIF if a reasonable metric for journals, the problem is that it's used to rate authors: what's the JIF of journals you publish in?
The metric presented here is much better for rating authors because it gives more of an author's peers an opportunity to vouch for him by citing his work, as opposed to only a small editorial board and review committee who decide if he gets into TopJournalX.
Adding a pagerank-style coefficient (increasing the weight of citations that come from well-cited papers) would make this metric even better for precisely the reason you state: papers exist in perpetuity. If I write a paper now but it is ignored for 50 years, then someone builds upon that to break ground in an entirely new field, then I deserve some indirect credit for that. The journal I published in does not.
Empirically, pagerank hasn't been very successful at ranking authors for the reasons I mentioned, along with other complications (e.g. papers have multiple authors).
But more importantly, you're confusing impact factor with peer review. Peer review decisions are double-blind, and impact factor doesn't play a role (shouldn't, anyway). Papers don't get published in Science and Nature based upon the authors' impact factors.
"There are a lot of people trying to use pagerank for academic journals, but so far it hasn't worked well for various reasons."
Apart from eigenfactor.org, what other examples do you know of?
I'm not aware of anyone using PageRank for individual articles. (I know this isn't what you were referring to in your comment).
I'd be interested to know what algorithm Google Scholar uses to compute its rankings. The rankings it returns seem to be pretty close to pure citation counts, with some minor variations, which could potentially be explained as being due to some sort of relevancy of the hit to the query.
Reading past the usual academic exaggeration (where everything is "promising" and "has potential"), the data is underwhelming -- there's no clear indication that pagerank has an advantage over traditional citation metrics.
Here's a Google cache link to a paper that discusses some of the things I was talking about (i.e. how the metaphor breaks down when moving from web to journals):
Presumably they'd do better than with the JIF system. Orthodoxy isn't the problem. He's still getting published & cited. He just can't get grants apparently because of his 1989 conference.
regardless of whether it is the right thing to do, what he is trying to do could be improved by being more like pagerank. i don't have an opinion on whether it is the right thing to do; i haven't given that much thought.
if it is AGPL (notice the A), then you must provide source to to your users, whereas with GPL it's when you distribute the code (can't send precompiled webapp)
they're still useful. they provide a good exercise for the designer, and although it may not be something that can be implemented/will be implemented they can experiment with ideas and present new patterns or just a particular arrangement of them. design theory work, i suppose, as opposed to designing for implementation.
if it's important, like a bank site, there's a way to unlock your account if you did ever lose your password. i see this as using features they didn't know that they had; specifically: "disable password hints" and "disable password alternatives"
that and buffett has been outspoken against quants. he has also been accused of 'being in the right place at the right time' or 'lucky' quite a few times, but this is not the case.
another good book on buffett which has some sections dedicated to buffett vs quants and buffett vs 'its all luck' ppl is "The making of an American Capitalist" (http://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowe...) -- first book I got on him, perhaps the best (got snowball, haven't read it yet).
The books go well together. "Making of" is way more hagiographic, and less detailed.
What would be really great would be a wikified list of his transactions, linked to the financial statements and news stories that were current at the time.
Eurocentric some? Thanks for the sagan quote, though, and the thoughts about euclid, ramanunjan, siddartha, bodhidharma, proudhon, and the vague admiration for people's names that i don't know, people who comprehended before there were equations, people who saw that all of life is emergent transformation, recognized not only introverted and extroverted states, but what people are today calling 'flow' and what some ended up calling 'zazen', and 3000 years ago they said was the third state, oh - and the fourth state, i supposed we don't have that here yet....but oh, still, love for arabic mathematicians and mayans obsessed with time. before we get to 'greatest' the question arises, greatest at what? if efficiency is the game, perhaps another read of brave new world and a reminder about The Ford is in order. if ability is the game, perhaps we should smile again at oppenheimer yelling that he is shiva. if the quality of human experience, the joy of living is the game, then is it really the internet, or is that just a medium through which we can share the real wealth? i got my gitosis working, made me smile, gotta love the internet - was walking to my car when she smiled and made small talk, gotta love the internet, but true wealth is somewhere between wisdom and that girl's smile.
You're onto something, and crash diets/extremes are no good, but there is a lot of value in giving it all up for periods of time. I wish I had opportunities to do this more frequently, once a year for a month would be very nice. I don't mean vacation - I mean disconnect.
There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.
I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle, things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.
You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency, or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.
Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend, or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this year for me, and that's unfortunate.
currently have 3 screens, and i thought about adding a 30" (for the continous document, then vertical stack two of the 22" screens next to it), but at the moment i have to turn my head to see the left monitor. i mostly work on the two right monitors, and use the left for ongoing IM conversations/etc. Beyond this, minimizing windows and just having many open seems just as productive as having to look around physically (instead of using switcher). anything im missing?
