[baghira]

exgrv's commment, the way I read it, was arguing for something less radical: "simply" insourcing the work of the journal publishers, and having it done by scientists (maybe allocating more resources to scientists so that the workload remains sane).

What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to establish relevance, such a model is much less effective at gauging quality (which is the problem, if you want to use bibliometric scores as a way to establish whose careers are to advance). In other term, the outcome of a search for "cloud computing" is certainly pertinent with the subject. That is not how you would choose which cloud service to use.

Of course, it may well be possible that the human judgment component is codifiable in a few hundred/thousand of heustics (sounds like a hard problem, but it's not my field), thus allowing the construction of a good model.

[sawwit]

Intuitively I think, the problem is much simpler compared to web search because it's a much smaller graph and each node gets checked against reality in some sense, while on the market and on Google things mostly only get compared with the competition under very obfuscated circumstances with extremely weak feedback loops. PageRank is probably unnecessary for most areas as they are small enough so that specialists can easily keep track of new publications. It could just be a useful tool for listing a lot of publications, but, as I said, measures like citation, review count and reputation of the institution are probably pretty good on their own. It was perhaps misleading that I've mentioned PageRank at all, it was just an idea that I had at the time I wrote the comment.