2.7 Erjia Yan el at. (2011) [12] this article provides an alternative perspective for measuring author impact by applying Pagerank algorithm to a co-authorship network by using different damping factors. The number of citations is an indicator used to measure the impact of scientific publications. Authors whose publications have been intensively cited usually have a higher academic impact in their respective fields. Co-authorship network analysis is expected to serve as the complement to traditional citation analysis. Among many indicators, Pagerank has great potential for co-authorship network analysis. The Pagerank algorithm (Brin & Page, 1998) assumes web hyperlinks to be trust votes and ranks the search results based on these links interconnecting them. Pagerank brings a new method to information retrieval for a better ranking of the web. For co-authorship networks, the Pagerank algorithm gives higher weights to the authors who collaborate with different authors, and also to authors who collaborate with a few highly coauthored authors. Pagerank is thus chosen as a complementary method to citation analysis, enabling us to identify author impact from a new perspective.
