Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffusion-based ranking algorithm for scientists using the entire Physical Review publication archive, providing a system-level analysis of scientific credit transfer and comparing it with traditional citation metrics.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel diffusion algorithm for ranking scientists based on weighted citation networks, offering a new perspective on scientific impact assessment.

Findings

The diffusion algorithm correlates with major physics awards.

It outperforms simple citation counts in ranking accuracy.

A publicly available tool implements the ranking method.

Abstract

Recently, the abundance of digital data enabled the implementation of graph based ranking algorithms that provide system level analysis for ranking publications and authors. Here we take advantage of the entire Physical Review publication archive (1893-2006) to construct authors' networks where weighted edges, as measured from opportunely normalized citation counts, define a proxy for the mechanism of scientific credit transfer. On this network we define a ranking method based on a diffusion algorithm that mimics the spreading of scientific credits on the network. We compare the results obtained with our algorithm with those obtained by local measures such as the citation count and provide a statistical analysis of the assignment of major career awards in the area of Physics. A web site where the algorithm is made available to perform customized rank analysis can be found at the address http://www.physauthorsrank.org