Total Scholarly Impact: Law Professor Citations in Non-Law Journals

Abstract

Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the first U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) ranking of law schools in 1987, scholars began developing rankings to replace or complement the U.S. News rankings. Over the past several decades, these efforts have included citation counts,' publication counts, reputation surveys, and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) download counts. Many aspects of legal rankings have improved since 1987, and the Scholarly Impact Scores pioneered by Brian Leiter and continued every three years by Gregory Sisk's research team have been particularly influential. But as the authors of the citation studies often acknowledge, citation counts are only one of several measures of scholarly impact, and citation counts are subject to fundamental shortcomings, including limitations arising from the time period and faculty included in the study, the difficulty of accounting for multiple co-authored works, and others.