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Google's PageRank Predicts Nobel Prize Winners
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jan 21, 2009 11:31 AM
from the that's-a-little-strange dept.
from the that's-a-little-strange dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The pattern of citations between scientific papers forms a network that has remarkable similarities to the network formed by the web. So why not use Google's PageRank, the world's most effective search algorithm to rank these papers in the same way it ranks websites? That's exactly what a couple of US researchers have done for physics papers published by the American Physical Society since 1893 (abstract). The results make interesting reading because almost all of the top ten papers resulted in (or were linked to) Nobel Prizes for their authors. Which means that studying the up-and-coming entries on the list ought to be a good way of predicting future winners. Better get your bets in before the bookies get wind of this."
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Great, Just Great (Score:2, Funny)
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You say this, and I imagine a Cessna Citation business jet armed with comically large bombs that it drops on scientists houses.
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Of course, in the application of PageRank to general internet search, there is a clear economic incentive to game the system (and so sometimes you see it done).
Why would anyone care enough where they land in a PageRank search of academic papers to game the system?
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When a search is performed for whatever the modern equivalent of radiation and x-ray crystallography* is, that person's paper would then pop up first, garner more citations, and potentially end up an authoritative source on the topic.
*Take a look at the contributions of early Nobel winners in Physics.
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bets? (Score:1)
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Sure, 20000000000000000:1 odds for myself, in economics, in the next 40 years.
Re:bets? (Score:5, Informative)
They take bets about this kind of thing?
Um, yeah, you would be surprised what offshore betting brings to the internet. My friend had money that Obama would say "Always bet on black" for his opening speech (paid 700:1) and that he would use the word 'banana' in his speech (paid 800:1). He lost them both. He also bets on every play during football games, especially returns. And he also bets on how long the national anthem lasts at the beginning of each game.
I wish I could link you to the site but it's hard to get to.
You may be able to say that there is always someone willing to quote you a line for anything anytime as long as they get a cut/rake.
Parent
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Can I propose a simpler scheme where your friend just mails me money while being a racist nitwit? As long as that's his idea of a hobby...
Re:bets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I propose a simpler scheme where your friend just mails me money while being a racist nitwit? As long as that's his idea of a hobby...
Sure, as long as you are willing to send him back several thousand dollars in the event of some highly unlikely event. It's called "gambling" and he loves the it. He's also Indian American and has a great sense of humor.
Perhaps your "racism" comments would be more better directed at the Irish bookie making these offerings to the betting community [speroforum.com]? I think the "Obama Cliche Betting" section has most of what was being offered.
Parent
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What will happen first under President Obama?
4/6 American led signed cease-fire agreement between Israel & Hamas
3/1 Full Troop withdrawal from Iraq
8/1 Capture of Osama Bin Laden
8/1 Online Gambling legalised
10/1 Full National recognition of Same Sex Marriage
12/1 Full Troop withdrawal from Afghanistan
18/1 Legalisation of Marijuana
20/1 Constitution changed to allow the President to serve 3 or more full terms
25/1 Total ban of Capital Punishment
50/1 Moonwalk confirmed as a fake by Obama
100/1 Complete ban on privately owned guns
500/1 Discovery of Aliens on Mars
FUUUCK, your friend is gonna be sooo rich. We already found ice on Mars!
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The part that bothers me is that the moonwalk being a fake is considered 10 times as likely as life on Mars.
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"If someone gives you 10,000 to 1 on anything, you take it. If John Mellencamp ever wins an Oscar, I am going to be a very rich dude." ~ Kevin, The Office
movie-star (Score:5, Insightful)
Did the star make the movie a hit, or did the movie make the star?
For 'prediction' to be valuable, it has to work with citations that were linked *before* the paper got the Nobel.
Nicola Cabibbo (Score:2, Interesting)
So even in this article Nicola Cabibbo demonstrated to deserve the Nobel Prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Cabibbo [wikipedia.org]
Or: International fame = more hits to your paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, like this is some kind of weird correlation. No shit Nobel prize winning papers would have excellent page ranks.
When they think we know, they change their mind (Score:1)
Yes, it happens all the time: the Swedish Academy can change their vote any time, if it feels pressed by the media.
Wrong assumptions (Score:1)
Take with a bucketful of salt (Score:2)
The original paper doesn't really discuss the connections with Nobel prizes - it mentions as an aside that one paper was cited for a Nobel prize - as it's concerned not with predicted Nobel laureates but evaluating the importance of papers. Therefore any conclusions about predicting Nobel winners are without merit until further analysis is performed.
No Kidding (Score:5, Informative)
The algorithm for Google PageRank is based on the concept of citations from academia. If I remember correctly, the software was originally meant only to index academic papers and eventually grew to index the whole internet. So its not surprising that it predicts winners so well (depending on how much the Nobel committee weights citations in their decisions).
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I don't know how one is nominated for a Nobel, but I don't think the decision takes citations into account at all. However, influential works are both more likely to win a Nobel prize and more likely to be cited often.
PageRank is very much like academic citation.
Re:No Kidding (Score:5, Informative)
The algorithm for Google PageRank is based on the concept of citations from academia
Exactly!
Quoting from the original paper: "It is obvious to try to apply standard citation analysis techniques to the web's hypertextual citation structure. One can simply think of every link as being like an academic citation. So, a major page like http: www.yahoo.com will have tens of housands of backlinks or citations pointing to it" [L Page, S Brin, R Motwani, T Winograd. The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web ].
the software was originally meant only to index academic papers
That's not right. From the same original paper:
"PageRank is a global ranking of all web pages, regardless of their content, based solely on their location in the Web's graph structure "
Anyway you are right, and the article's idea sounds way too old: probably an example of two research communities (physics & citation analysis) not knowing too much of each other
Parent
not the interweb (Score:2)
Note that they're not looking at webpage referrals, but citations in other scientific papers. Rather than simply counting citations, they're weighting the citations by the number of citations the citing papers received. Thus, if your paper is cited by a paper which is very popular, then your paper will get a boost to it's citation score.
winners bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not having read the actual paper, the following question comes to mind: did they include only the period of time *before* the physicists got their Nobels? Because if they included the citations after that - yeah, I imagine those authors got quite a few citations being Nobel Prize winners and all...
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Yeah, I thought the same thing. Then I actually read the article. They aren't claiming the highest ranked pages are going to win a Nobel. In fact the author of the highest ranked paper has not received a Nobel. Instead they are suggesting that authors of higher ranked papers are likely candidates for a Nobel. If they had done what you suggest, it would have been more interesting.
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In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Top 40 music singles chart predicts highest-selling singles of the week with astounding precision!
Logical Progression (Score:2, Funny)
The next step is obviously to let PageRank select the Nobel winners and cut out the middleman.
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The next step is obviously to let PageRank select the Nobel winners and cut out the middleman.
I can't wait for my first Nobel Prize Optimization spam.
So Tired of Useless Tags (Score:5, Insightful)
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Check out "The Case of El Naschie" for how to game academic publishing. (Become an editor of a vanity paper, publish 5 articles a month, cross-cite every article with 10 similar 'scientists').
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Lets tag this article with "lametags" or "uselesstagsincludingthisone" =P
hmm indeed (Score:2)
And of course the results of their experiment are submitted in the form of a research paper. Hmm, I wonder...
Large Numbers (Score:2)
The foundation for the work of Messrs. Maslov and Redner was laid by Hari Seldon, who discovered [wikipedia.org] that "while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events." The recent paper by Messrs. Maslov and Redner represents the smallest corpus to which Seldon's theory has been successfully applied to date.
Further applications of these techniques to this same corpus will likely fall afoul of Seldon
Citations are often negative (Score:4, Informative)
Cause and effect confusion (Score:2)
Impact factor? (Score:2)
I wonder how different the result are from the normal cumulated Impact factor of the scientists publications....
But i forgot. Google is the only database on the planet....
Cause or Effect? (Score:2)
backwards history (Score:2)
Actually, citation ranking was first and developed some time in the 1970's. Google's page rank algorithm was an application of citation ranking to the web. The original Page Rank paper even cites the citation ranking papers.
(This also kinds of points out a problem with citation ranking: everybody these days is going to cite page rank, even though the idea originally was developed by other people. So, citation ranking isn't going to tell you who should get the credit, only who popularized an idea.)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope they never award the Nobel Prized based strictly on this. It could be a good way of pointing people in the right direction, but it will also let in a bunch of crap.
The last thing we need is scientists Googlebombing their papers (or creating junk networks to increase page ranks). I bet the Creationists would have a field day with this. "Look, our theories have scientific basis, check out our CiteRank".
Technology is a tool, it should never replace human intelligence.
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Weather is the odd one out because all the other variables are influenced by the prediction made. Expectations of risk (or correlation of currency movements, or default rates on loans) affect the
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There's nothing wrong with computer models, without them we'd never get any high end engineering done.
However the model can't be better then it's underlying assumptions and here I think that they've confused the relationship.
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Let's see, so far, computer models *can* predict the weather and are probably *right* about climate.
But unsurprisingly have failed to accurately manage loan portfolios to higher risk buyers, failed to manage risk books for hedge funds, could not capture currency trading, simply because they are not predictable because they are traded by panic driven, idiots who are swayed by rumour, non existent trends, and computer predictions!
The predictable but complex is predictable, the unpredictable ... is unpredicta
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panic driven, idiots who are swayed by rumour, non existent trends, and computer predictions!
Sounds like we should be using Macs to predict the economy -- that's their main source of operating power anyway :-p
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Let's see, so far, computer models *can* predict the weather and are probably *right* about climate
The reason I made the crack about the Climate was because the reason some of the long since resolved Mann controversy was because he used code that he also used for banking and thus couldn't share it. I don't remember the exact deal or even if it was true, but the thought inspired me to a joke, if it were true.
So, if you can put aside your feelings about gw for a second, given that the left has so much riding
Pft.. that'd be easy to do. Pick something harder (Score:2)
Bowel movements would be pretty easy to predict tbh. You just get the Android app to track your bowel movements, it'll upload it to a google appliance gizmo that creates a trend.. maybe some input function to add in the primary sections of your diet (for instance, you ate something with alittle more fat or fiber.. etc..)
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If I eat at Baja Surf, predict bowel movement within 5 minutes of leaving restaurant?
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