A combined approach for evaluating papers, authors and scientific journals

An integrated model for ranking scientific publications together with authors and journals recently presented in Bini, Del Corso, Romani, ETNA 2008] is closely analyzed. The model, which relies on certain adjacency matrices H,K and F obtained from the relations of citation, authorship and publication, provides the ranking by means of the Perron vector of a stochastic matrix obtained by combining H,K and F. Some perturbation theorems concerning the Perron vector previously introduced by the authors are extended to more general cases and a counterexample to a property previously addressed by the authors is presented. The theoretical results confirm the consistency and effectiveness of our model. Some paradigmatic examples are reported together with some results obtained on a real set of data.