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Google's PageRank Predicts Nobel Prize Winners
KentuckyFC writes "The pattern of citations between scientific papers forms a network that has remarkable similarities to the network formed by the web. So why not use Google's PageRank, the world's most effective search algorithm to rank these papers in the same way it ranks websites? That's exactly what a couple of US researchers have done for physics papers published by the American Physical Society since 1893 (abstract). The results make interesting reading because almost all of the top ten papers resulted in (or were linked to) Nobel Prizes for their authors. Which means that studying the up-and-coming entries on the list ought to be a good way of predicting future winners. Better get your bets in before the bookies get wind of this."
Did the star make the movie a hit, or did the movie make the star?
For 'prediction' to be valuable, it has to work with citations that were linked *before* the paper got the Nobel.
Not having read the actual paper, the following question comes to mind: did they include only the period of time *before* the physicists got their Nobels? Because if they included the citations after that - yeah, I imagine those authors got quite a few citations being Nobel Prize winners and all...
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"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Anyone else really get tired of the friggin tags for a lot of these stories? CorrelationIsNotCausation (this meme here really needs to go, saying it dosn't make you sound smart when it makes no sense or is bleedingly obvious) , and BecauseItWillGetGamed? GTFO. How the hell do you as a scientist game the entire specter of academic publishing to get yourself voted as a nobel prize winner, without you know, maybe actually doing some good science (and having it further recognized by being cited heavily by peers)? The tags are next to useless unless they are good as flamebait (yes am aware of the irony)
The algorithm for Google PageRank is based on the concept of citations from academia
Exactly!
Quoting from the original paper: "It is obvious to try to apply standard citation analysis techniques to the web's hypertextual citation structure. One can simply think of every link as being like an academic citation. So, a major page like http: www.yahoo.com will have tens of housands of backlinks or citations pointing to it" [L Page, S Brin, R Motwani, T Winograd. The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web ].
the software was originally meant only to index academic papers
That's not right. From the same original paper:
"PageRank is a global ranking of all web pages, regardless of their content, based solely on their location in the Web's graph structure "
Anyway you are right, and the article's idea sounds way too old: probably an example of two research communities (physics & citation analysis) not knowing too much of each other
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.