[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.