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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Social Sciences Citation Index and Law Faculty Rankings

By Alfred Brophy

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I haven't blogged about rankings in, oh, a while--maybe not since the US News rankings came out this spring? (Ok -- I had a fun post on the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, which was feature on Law and Order, recently, but I don't think that counts.) So ... it's time for some ranking talk. This is inspired by a conversation I had with Kim Krawiec recently about whether citation studies that relied on westlaw alone are fair to schools with serious scholarly presence in interdisciplinary work, like economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and -- nearest to my heart -- history. And it's also inspired by conversations I've had with a number of people about hiring; seems like it's a very common practive for schools considering laterals to look at their westlaw citations, as well as even ssrn downloads.

Citation studies have all sorts of problems -- for fields where more work is being done, there is more opportunity for citations. So it's hard to make direct comparisons across fields. This point is really illustrated well by Brian Leiter's 2007 study of most cited faculty by speciality. The fifth most cited constitutional law professor (Mark Tushnet) had 2780 citations; the fifth most cited law and economics professor (Steven Shavell) had 1470 citations; the fifth most cited critical theories professor (Catherine MacKinnon) had 1210 citations; the fifth most cited evidence professor (Christopher Mueller) had 340 citations; the fifth most cited tax professor (Reuven Avi-Yonah) had 290 citations. And trusts and estates ... the fifth most cited t&e scholar (Jeffrey Pennell) had 150 citations. (It's moments like these that I ask why I write at the intersection of legal history and trusts and estates.)

For people who work in "law and" fields, there are really two problems. First, some fields are pretty small (and this true even for some core law fields, like tax and trusts and estates) -- so there aren't a whole lot of opportunities for scholars' work to be cited. The (obviously self-serving) example I like to use is this: how many articles on seventeenth century American legal history will be published in this decade? Even terrific work in that area will have few opportunities to be cited. Now, I completely understand that one part of our job is to be engaged in important debates and I understand those of you who say, "hey, if you're writing on seveteenth century Pennsylvania law books, you're pretty far from the mainstream of questions that motivate our profession." True enough, though that does not tell us about a scholar's quality.

There's a second problem here as well: that some of the citations to "law and" scholarship comes in journals that aren't on westlaw, so that westlaw under-represents a scholar's impact. Mary Dudziak's been calling attention to these field biases for a long time and in particular the problems for assessment of legal historians.

So one solution is to supplement a westlaw search with a citation search in the social sciences citation index (and perhaps the arts and humanities index as well). The ssci includes full coverage of nearly 2000 social sciences journals (including more than 100 law journals); the arts and humanities index covers more than 1000 arts and humanities journals.

The law journals are a somewhat eclectic group--there are the "usual suspects," like the main law reviews at California, Cornell, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Georgetown, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, NYU, Northwestern, Southern California, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Yale .... and other heavy hitters like the Business Lawyer, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Economics, and then also some other specialized journals, too. Thus, a search of citations to a scholar in the ssci and arts and humanities index will tell us a lot about how much one is cited in major journals, including major law journals.

Anyway, check it out -- here's a link to the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI for short) search page. (Though it's only going to work if you're coming from a url with a subscription).

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 14, 2009 (boomark / email).