The paper describes a very interesting approach to citation analysis. I am planning on work on similar lines and found this paper to be very helpful. Network traffic to a particular node in a network should be a good metric to go with when considering citation and the importance of the node in question.
Reviewed by
ankurcha
as

- 2009-09-27 12:44:22
To account for strong aging characteristics of citation networks, we modify Google's PageRank algorithm by initially distributing random surfers exponentially with age, in favor of more recent publications. The output of this algorithm, which we call CiteRank, is interpreted as approximate traffic to individual publications in a simple model of how researchers find new information. We develop an analytical understanding of traffic flow in terms of an RPA-like model and optimize parameters of our algorithm to achieve the best performance. The results are compared for two rather different citation networks: all American Physical Society publications and the set of high-energy physics theory (hep-th) preprints. Despite major differences between these two networks, we find that their optimal parameters for the CiteRank algorithm are remarkably similar.