Mike Thelwall, Can Google's PageRank be used to find the most important academic Web pages?Journal of Documentation, 59, 2 (2003) pp. 205-217. From the abstract: "This paper reports on the outcome of applying the algorithm to the Web sites of three national university systems in order to test whether it is capable of identifying the most important Web pages. The results are also compared with simple inlink counts. It was discovered that the highest inlinked pages do not always have the highest PageRank, indicating that the two metrics are genuinely different, even for the top pages. More significantly, however, internal links dominated external links for the high ranks in either method and superficial reasons accounted for high scores in both cases. It is concluded that PageRank is not useful for identifying the top pages in a site and that it must be combined with a powerful text matching techniques in order to get the quality of information retrieval results provided by Google." (Thanks to Erik Arfeuille.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/03/2003 10:20:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
