[timr]

There have been a bunch of papers over the years, with varying levels of success. Here's a short one that tries pagerank on a set of physics papers:

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/28/44/11103

Reading past the usual academic exaggeration (where everything is "promising" and "has potential"), the data is underwhelming -- there's no clear indication that pagerank has an advantage over traditional citation metrics.

Here's a Google cache link to a paper that discusses some of the things I was talking about (i.e. how the metaphor breaks down when moving from web to journals):

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:KdKSGivmckgJ:www.cais-a...

As I said, there have been lots of other papers. I don't recall seeing one that made a convincing case, but I'm certainly not an expert....