Promise and Pitfalls of Extending Google's PageRank Algorithm to Citation Networks

We review our recent work on applying the Google PageRank algorithm to find scientific “gems” among all Physical Review publications, and its extension to CiteRank, to find currently popular research directions. These metrics provide a meaningful extension to traditionally-used importance measures, such as the number of citations and journal impact factor. We also point out some pitfalls of over-relying on quantitative metrics to evaluate scientific quality.