PageRank predicts Nobel laureates

Ranking scientists by the number of references to their work is a thankless job. Anyone can name multiple vulnerabilities in such a system.

1. Not all links are the same. The significance of the referencing work is an important factor.
2. Scientists from different fields of science use quotations and references in different ways. Work in the field of life sciences is cited six times, work on physics - three times, and on mathematics - only one.
3. Breakthrough works may be cited less frequently than usual because they affect niche research areas at an early stage of their development.
4. Important works often stop quoting when they go to textbooks.

The cross-reference pattern between academic papers forms a complex network, similar to a network of hyperlinks on the Internet. Perhaps this is the key to discovering the best way to assess the significance of a particular work?
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Sergey Maslov from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Sydney Redner from Boston University asked themselves the same question and suggested that the Google PageRank algorithm could help to understand the problem a bit.

As in the case of web pages, PageRank for scientific work takes into account not only the number of inbound links, but also the “weight” of each scientific work where the link comes from. This weight is calculated, in turn, by the number of incoming links to it. So quotes in important works are valued higher.

Maslov and Redner applied the algorithm to 353,268 articles published by the American Physical Society since 1893 in such journals as Physical Review Letters. And the results are truly encouraging.

Here is the first ten of them:
1. Unitary Symmetry & Leptonic Decays by Cabibbo
2. Theory of Superconductivity by Bardeen, Cooper & Schrieffer
3. Self-Consistent Equations ... by Kohn & Sham
4. Inhomogeneous Electron Gas by Hohenberg & Kohn
5. A Model of Leptons by Weinberg
6. Crystal Statistics ... by Onsager
7. Theory of the Fermi Interaction by Feynman & Gell-Mann
8. Absence of Diffusion in ... by Anderson
9. The Theory of Complex Spectra by Slater
10. Scaling Theory of Localization by Abrahams, Anderson, et al.

This is an impressive list. Most importantly, almost all the authors mentioned are Nobel laureates (it is curious that the author of the very first work on the list, Cabibbo, did not receive a Nobel. This should attract the attention of the Nobel Committee, which awarded the last prize in physics to Japanese researchers, than work on the ideas of cabibbo).

All this suggests a simple idea. You can track updates to this list, which will be a good way to predict future Nobel laureates.