Amodio, Prof. Pierluigi and Brugnano, Prof. Luigi (2012) Recent advances in bibliometric indexes and the PaperRank problem. Technical Report 2012.06.04, no. 1, Dipartimento di Matematica "U.Dini", Universita' di Firenze.

Abstract

Bibliometric indexes are customary used in evaluating the impact of scientific research, even though it is very well known that in different research areas they may range in very different intervals. Sometimes, this is evident even within a single given field of investigation. On the other hand, the problem can be recast in the same framework which has allowed to efficiently cope with the ordering of web-pages, i.e., to formulate the PageRank of Google. For this reason, we call such problem the PaperRank problem, which we here solve by using a similar approach to that used for the page rank. The obtained solution, which is mathematically grounded, will be used to compare the usual heuristics of citations with a new one here proposed. Some numerical tests show that the new heuristics is much more reliable than the currently used one.