This is a very interresting news if this is true. I'm managing a web site with one page containing article abstracts and references to pdf files. Our rank is surprinzingly not very good. I will try the proposed change and see if things get better. Articles are original content of scholar quality level.
Why in the world are you surprised the rank is not very good? If the site is one page + links to PDF's, you're unlikely to have a large number of inbound links, which means your pagerank is unlikely to get particularly high.
