Q. Is there a correlation between scholarly and teaching success? A. Of course not.

Hat tip to Brian Leiter who, in calling attention to the below study, notes that there certainly are questions about how to measure teaching success. I would add that there certainly are questions about measuring scholarly success too. Law profs have a long way to go in terms of studying scholarly success empirically. Until they move beyond raw data collection -- number of books and articles published, number of times articles are cited, number of articles published in "prestigious" serials, number of article downloaded from digital repositories -- to performing a proper longitudinal citation context analysis, the measurement of scholarly success will show little, if any progress.

Oy, its amateur hour in bibliometrics! I wish someone would take the next step ... of course, I mean someone other than myself. We all know how difficult and time-consuming a longitudinal citation context analysis is!

Here's one citation study that merits some attention: The Mother of All Law Review Citation Studies Finds Dead Papers Abound (August 16, 2005) [JH]

The study...

Benjamin Barton (Tennessee)
Is There a Correlation Between Scholarly Productivity, Scholarly Influence and Teaching Effectiveness in American Law Schools? An Empirical Study (July 1, 2006)   
 
Abstract:      
This empirical study attempts to answer an age-old debate in legal academia; whether scholarly productivity helps or hurts teaching. The study is of an unprecedented size and scope. It covers every tenured or tenure-track faculty member at 19 American law schools, a total of 623 professors. The study gathers four years of teaching evaluation data (calendar years 2000-03) and creates an index for teaching effectiveness.

This index was then correlated against five different measures of research productivity. The first three measure each professor's productivity for the years 2000-03. These productivity measures include a raw count of publications and two weighted counts. The scholarly productivity measure weights scholarly books and top-20 or peer reviewed law review articles above casebooks, treatises or other publications. By comparison, the practice-oriented productivity measure weights casebooks, treatises and practitioner articles at the top of the scale. There are also two measures of scholarly influence. One is a lifetime citation count, and the other is a count of citations per year.

These five measures of research productivity cover virtually any definition of research productivity. Combined with four years of teaching evaluation data the study provides a powerful measure of both sides of the teaching versus scholarship debate.

The study correlates each of these five different research measures against the teaching evaluation index for all 623 professors, and each individual law school. The results are counter-intuitive: there is no correlation between teaching effectiveness and any of the five measures of research productivity. Given the breadth of the study, this finding is quite robust. The study should prove invaluable to anyone interested in the priorities of American law schools, and anyone interested in the interaction between scholarship and teaching in higher education.

Editor's Note: "The results are counter-intuitive: there is no correlation between teaching effectiveness and ... research productivity." Really? Hardly counter-intuitive to most people, I think.