In the Dark

This weekend I came across a provocative paper on the arXiv with the title Measuring the academic reputation through citation records via PageRank. Here is the abstract:

The objective assessment of the prestige of an academic institution is a difficult and hotly debated task. In the last few years, different types of University Rankings have been proposed to quantify the excellence of different research institutions in the world. Albeit met with criticism in some cases, the relevance of university rankings is being increasingly acknowledged: indeed, rankings are having a major impact on the design of research policies, both at the institutional and governmental level. Yet, the debate on what rankings are  exactly measuring is enduring. Here, we address the issue by measuring a quantitative and reliable proxy of the academic reputation of a given institution and by evaluating its correlation with different university rankings. Specifically, we study citation patterns among universities in five different Web of Science Subject Categories and use the PageRank algorithm on the five resulting citation networks. The rationale behind our work is that scientific citations are driven by the reputation of the reference so that the PageRank algorithm is expected to yield a rank which reflects the reputation of an academic institution in a specific field. Our results allow to quantifying the prestige of a set of institutions in a certain research field based only on hard bibliometric data. Given the volume of the data analysed, our findings are statistically robust and less prone to bias, at odds with ad hoc surveys often employed by ranking bodies in order to attain similar results. Because our findings are found to correlate extremely well with the ARWU Subject rankings, the approach we propose in our paper may open the door to new, Academic Ranking methodologies that go beyond current methods by reconciling the qualitative evaluation of Academic Prestige with its quantitative measurements via publication impact.

(The link to the description of the PageRank algorithm was added by me; I also corrected a few spelling mistakes in the abstract). You can find the full paper here (PDF).

For what it’s worth, I think the paper contains some interesting ideas (e.g. treating citations as a `tree’ rather than a simple `list’) but the authors make some assumptions that I find deeply questionable (e.g. that being cited among a short reference listed is somehow of higher value than in a long list). The danger is that using such information in a metric could form an incentive to further bad behaviour (such as citation cartels).

I have blogged quite a few times about the uses and abuses of citations (see tag here) , and I won’t rehearse these arguments here. I will say, however, that I do agree with the idea of sharing citations among the authors of the paper rather than giving each and every author credit for the total. Many astronomers disagree with this point of view, but surely it is perverse to argue that the 100th author of a paper with 51 citations deserves more credit than the sole author of paper with 49?

Above all, though, the problem with constructing a metric for `Academic Reputation’ is that the concept is so difficult to define in the first place…