[mariorz]

and I'm pretty sure Larry Page did not design pagerank to be used for ranking academic papers, it was for the web since the start. There was actually previous work on a similar ranking system for academic papers that was referenced in pagerank iirc.

[ig0rskee]

I wish I could call them up and ask, I stand corrected

[mariorz]

Well you can't call them but here is their paper on pagerank http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/

There is a short mention of previous work done with academic citation analysis and there is also a bit at the end about the original purpose of the algorithm (displaying ranked backlinks.)