Law Librarian Blog

Top 30 Law Prof Blogs: Harmless if not Very Meaningful Competition

Paul Caron (Cincinnati) charts traffic statistics of the "leading blogs" edited by law professors who use SiteMeter to record blog traffic. The selection of blogs is drawn from Dan Solove's "comprehensive" Law Professor Blogger Census, which of course isn't comprehensive (nor claimed by Solove to be) and wouldn't stand up to the population identification rigors needed for a real infometric analysis. But Caron's ranking, harmless if not very meaningful, is good enough for a blog post and a round of back slapping in law school faculty lounges across the country.

Or to put it another way:

Who cares [about law prof blog traffic rankings], you say?  Blog Emperor Caron, of course!  Curious that four of the top five have almost nothing to do with law; four of the top five are right-wing blogs; and three of the top five have almost no intellectual content.  Welcome to the blogosphere! -- Posted by Brian Leiter (Texas)

Indeed, welcome to the academic legal blogosphere law prof style, complete with pathological myopia. Caron's ranking is, shall we say, a tad elitist. It intentionally excludes academic law library/law librarian blogs. He notes, for example, that Law Librarian Blog is not edited by law profs. Apparently my co-editor's credentials as an AAUP-represented tenured faculty member aren't good enough; neither are yours if similarly situated. The academic legal blogosphere must be a very exclusive club; membership, alas, does not require publishing intellectual content.

Of course the information for an inclusive traffic-based "ranking" is readily available thanks to Bonnie Shucha's excellent directory which was updated earlier this month and now lists 140 law library/law librarian blogs, many of which do reside in the academic legal blogosphere.

The giggle factor for info antics about the legal blogosphere is pretty high among law librarians and some, hopefully most, law profs. I wonder if LIS profs use these all too common posts as examples of what infometrics is not. Bottom line: take them for what they are worth -- law blog trivial pursuit.

Kudos to Dennis Kennedy for recognizing the contributions law library/law librarian bloggers make to the legal blogosphere by repeatedly awarding them his annual Blawggie Award for "Best Legal Blog Category".

"I have to be one of the biggest fans of law librarian blogs there is. I learn so much from these blogs and they get named for this award [Best Legal Blog Category] every year. As I said before, 'across the board, these blogs have developed into strong information resources, often with links to primary source information that I'm not sure how I would find otherwise.'" -- Dennis Kennedy

[quoted in our coverage of Kennedy's 2007 Blawggies]

Footnote: Law Librarian Blog would have come in 19th place by visitors and page views for the period covered in Caron's blog ranking. Other academic law library/law librarian blogs may have placed higher if they had been included but I'm sure Caron has other ways to show his appreciation for the contributions academic law librarians make. [JH]

Professional Reading: Review of Metric Services for Digital Libraries and Repositories

Chris Armbruster's (Research Associate, Max Planck Digital Library and Executive Director, Research Network 1989) Access, Usage and Citation Metrics: What Function for Digital Libraries and Repositories in Research Evaluation? is available from SSRN. Here's the abstract for this very interesting and helpful review article:

The growth and increasing complexity of global science poses a grand challenge to scientists: How to organise the worldwide evaluation of research programmes and peers? For the 21st century we need not just information on science, but also meta-level scientific information that is delivered to the digital workbench of every researcher. Access, usage and citation metrics will be one major information service that researchers will need on an everyday basis to handle the complexity of science.

Scientometrics has been built on centralised commercial databases of high functionality but restricted scope, mainly providing information that may be used for research assessment. Enter digital libraries and repositories: Can they collect reliable metadata at source, ensure universal metric coverage and defray costs?

This systematic appraisal of the future role of digital libraries and repositories for metric research evaluation proceeds by investigating the practical inadequacies of current metric evaluation before defining the scope for libraries and repositories as new players. Subsequently the notion of metrics as research information services is developed. Finally, the future relationship between a) libraries and repositories and b) metrics databases, commercial or non-commercial, is addressed.

Service reviewed include: Leiden Ranking, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, COUNTER, MESUR, Harzing POP, CiteSeer, Citebase, RePEc LogEc and CitEc, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

Some Evidence for the Assimilation of Blogs into the Structure of Legal Literature

Why Cite to Blogs?

There are a number of reasons to cite to blogs. Ones usually identified are factual assertions, crediting/criticizing ideas, and using a blog post as supporting authority but one largely overlooked reason is the role blogs play as informal repositories of downloadable documents.

Recently Balkinization's Jack Balkin and The Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr observed that the law review citation rate for their blogs has increased somewhat significantly on an annual basis since 2004. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Blogs, as Jack Balkin writes "are being assimilated into the larger universe of legal writing and becoming part of the web of [legal] citations."

I took a quick look at annual blog citation rates for 2004-2007 recently and found similar increases. Using LexisNexis, instead of Westlaw (hat tip to PrawfsBlawg's Dan Markel who was wondering why no one seems to use Lexis-Nexis for citation counts anymore), I searched US Law Reviews & Journals Combined and US Federal & State Cases Combined by the domain name of three common blog service providers (blogspot.com, typepad.com, and wordpress.com) to estimate citation rates.

At the outset, I should emphasize that this search method underestimates the number of blog citations, possibly by a wide margin. For example, The Volokh Conspiracy was not captured because its URL, http://volokh.com/, does not identify a blog hosting service while Balkinization was captured because its URL, http://balkin.blogspot.com/,  does include one of the blog hosting services I searched. Additional understating is likely due to the fact that this is a document count, not a pure citation count. (Any single counted document may cite two or more blogs, or more than one post from the same blog.)

This built-in undercount does not diminish from the fact that the below statistics do give a sense of the magnitude of the growth rate of blog citations. According to this estimate, blog citations in law reviews and court opinions have grown from about 70 in 2004 to over 500 in 2007 (and still counting since many law reviews have not completed their 2007 publishing cycle). I believe it is fair to say that for 2005 and 2006 blog citations probably grew exponentially on a document count basis, doubling each year. 

It is unlikely, however, that any final count for 2007 will show a similar rate of growth. If the case, would this mean that blogs are "on the decline." Doubtful. It would simply mean that the blogging phenomenon is maturing. As with other forms of publication, with age comes acceptance and recognition of place within the structure of legal literature.

Click to enlarge. [JH]

Be True to Your School

Check out the ten law schools who graduated the most law teachers on Brian Leiter's Law School Reports. The data was obtained from 7,820 tenured and tenure-track law professors listed in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers.

The data was provided to Leiter by a Michigan Assistant Dean in response to Leiter's recent Ludicrous Hyperbole Watch: University of Michigan Law School post. Leiter (JD '87 and Ph.D in philosophy '95 from Michigan) writes, "The data [as supplied] was presented in aggregate form, which works to the advantage of larger schools like Michigan." Ah yes, crunch the numbers to make your school look good. Leiter reworked the data for a more appropriate per capita ranking.

Beware the thin-skinned law school administrator. [JH]

The Monopoly Board of Citation Rankings

Check out Roger Alford's The Monopoly Board of Citation Rankings. Using Brian Leiter's Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007, Alford assigns each of the 18 specialties covered in Leiter’s 7-year citation study a real estate value based on the 10th most-cited person in each specialty. It's a much more clever illustration than my more mundane citation density graph. [JH]

Just Released: Leiter's Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007

Editor's Note: The below does not reflected revisions made to Brian Leiter's Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007 study. [JH]

Brian Leiter has published his study entitled Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007 at Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings. Here's the announcement on his blog. The study identifies the 10 most cited faculty (in many instances the 20 most cited faculty) in 18 legal specialties. The image (left, click to enlarge) displays the citation density for the top 10 most cited faculty in each specialty. Note how compact Will, Trusts and Estates, Tax, Criminal Law and Procedure, and several other specialties are.

Leiter's study also ranks the top 15 law schools by percentage of faculty in the Top 10 or Top 20 of their specialties. Not surprisingly, Yale ranks first.

If one wishes to estimate a law school's scholarly reputation in a specialty by the number of faculty members listed in Leiter's citation analysis of that specialty then Yale stands out with 4 faculty members in the top 10 for Constitutional and Public Law and 3 in the top 8 for Legal History; Columbia with 3 in the top 4 for Business Law; Harvard with 2 in the top 3 and Georgetown with 3 in the top 10 for Critical Theories; UC-Berkeley with 2 in the top 3 for IP/Cyberlaw; and the University of Chicago with 3 in the top 4 for Law & Economics.

Top Guns. Some top ranked law professors stand out by how many more citations their work has garnered over the next most cited scholar in their specialty. For example:

• Constitutional and Public Law: Cass Sustein's 6,180 citations (first in the field) compared to Laurence Tribe's 3,520 (second);
• Law & Economics: Richard Epstein, first with 3,390 citations, Eric Posner, second with 2,020 (but Epstein has had a 22 year head start);
• Law & Philosophy: Ronald Dworkin, 3,070 followed by Martha Nussbaum, 1,130; and
• Legal Ethics/Legal Profession: Deborah Rhodes with 3,180, Geoffrey Hazard, Jr., 1,140.

A Quick Look at Demographics for the Top 10 Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty

Click on the image for a larger display

Young Guns. As observed by Leiter, the lists are dominated by faculty in their 50s and 60s but I was surprised to find that the "young guns" are fairly well represented with 16% of the listed Top 10 most cited faculty being under the age of 50, including the following scholars listed in the Top 5 of their specialty:

• Criminal Law and Procedure: Dan Kahan (Yale) age 44 (ranked 1st), William Stuntz (Harvard) 49 (4th)
• Environmental Law: Richard Revesz (New York) 49 (3rd)
• International Law: Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) 45 (1st), Curtis Bradley (Duke) 43 (4th) and Sean Murphy (George Washington) 47 (5th)
• IP/Cyber Law: Mark Lemley (Stanford) 41 (1st), Robert Merges (UC-Berkeley) 48 ((2nd), Dan Burk (Minnesota) 45 (tied for 5th)
• Law & Economics: Eric Posner (Chicago) 42 (2nd), Ian Ayres (Yale) 48 (3rd)
• Law & Social Science: Lee Epstein (Northwestern) 49 (2nd), Jeffrey Rachlinski (Cornell) 41 (5th)
• Tax: Edward McCaffery (USC) 49 (3rd)

Two thirty-somethings made the most cited lists: Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) who at the age of 33 is the seventh most cited scholar in Wills, Trusts & Estates, and Orin Kerr (George Washington) age 36, the 20th most cited scholar in Criminal Law & Procedure. Not bad for a citation study that goes back to 2000.

Gender. Sixteen percent of the Top 10 most cited faculty are women, including the following scholars listed in the Top 5 of their speciality:

• Civil Procedure: Judith Resnik (Yale) (ranked 2nd), Deborah Hensler (Stanford) (4th)
• Critical Theories: Martha Minow (Harvard) (1st), Catharine MacKinnon (Michigan) (5th)
• Environmental Law: Carol Rose (Arizona) (2nd)
• Evidence: Margaret Berger (Brooklyn) (2nd)
• IP/Cyber Law: Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley) (3rd), Jessica Litman (Michigan) (4th), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia) (tied for 5th)
• Labor & Employment: Katherine van Wezel Stone (UCLA) (4th), Cynthia Estlund (New York) (5th)
• Law & Philosophy: Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) (2nd)
• Law & Social Science: Deborah Merrit (OSU) (3rd)
• Legal Ethics/Legal Profession: Deborah Rhode (Stanford) (1st)
• Legal History: Reva Siegel (Yale) (3rd)

Much more detail at Brian Leiter's Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007. [JH]

Size Still Matters in Latest Per Capita Faculty Productivity Study

Professor Michael Yelnosky, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Roger Williams has released this draft "productivity" study of Tier 3 and Tier 4 law schools (Criteria used in study). The Yelnosky study applies features of the method used by Texas law prof Brian Leiter in an earlier 2000-2002 study  (Criteria used in study) with some modifications. For example, unlike the Leiter study, the Yelnosky study examines the Top 50 journals, defined as the general law reviews published by the 54 schools receiving the highest peer assessment scores in the U.S. News Rankings (2.8 or higher).

Readers of this blog will note that I respect Leiter's law school rankings studies for their careful employment of objective metrics and equally careful identification and examination of the shortcomings of ranking studies, including his own. See, for example, Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact for 2007 (one of "those rare citation studies coming out of the legal academy that exemplifies the precision of infometrics, not the carelessness of 'info antics.'").

One metric in Leiter's 200-2002 study that is used in Yelnosky's study, however, is not one of Leiter's best efforts. He applied a points system to the length of articles (0 points for articles under 6 pages; 1 point for articles 6-20 pages; 2 points for articles 21-50 pages; 3 points for articles exceeding 50 pages) and addressed the self-publishing aspect of articles published in-house by halving their point values. Objective? Yes, but the "so what" factor looms large because of the arbitrary nature of the page cutoffs for earning points. For an earlier study using the same methodology for per capita faculty productivity, see Brian Leiter, Measuring the Academic Distinction of Law Faculties, 29 Journal of Legal Studies 451 (2000) [Westlaw].

I agree with Leiter on two issues. Short law review articles and in-house publications should be addressed in per capita faculty productivity studies. But I would not use a points system. Instead I would simply identity both facets in a table and use cumulative stats for data analysis: (1) all articles; (2) all articles longer than X pages; (3) all non-in-house articles, etc.

The Yelnosky study continues the early Leiter "tradition." I'm happy to note that Leiter has not. [JH]

Three Thumbs Down on LLJ Published Info Antics Article

When my co-editor Ron Jones called Nova law profs Robert M. Jarvis and Phyllis Coleman's Ranking Law Reviews by Author Prominence - Ten Years Later, 99 Law Library Journal 573 (2007) to my attention, my first thought was to categorize the work as "Professional Reading." After reviewing the methodology, it's more info antics than metrics. Much more. I have to concur with Brian Leiter's assessment of this work. "This, sad to say, has to be the most pointless ranking exercise since the Cooley silliness, one that truly succeeds in conveying no meaningful information." Ranking Law Reviews by "Author Prominence", Brian Leiter's Law School Reports. See also PropertyProf Blog editor Ben Barros' Law Review Rankings of the Worst Sort ("The contributor scale on page three is just absurd.").

It's one thing to point to Noble laureates as Garfield once did in a "proof of concept" moment but quite another to create a 40-category contributor scale like Jarvis and Coleman does. I'm not listing the "Top X" results from this study for obvious reasons. [JH]

Law Librarian Blog Garners 5th Place in OEDb's Top 25 Librarian Bloggers Ranking

Online Education Database reports that Law Librarian Blog ranks fifth in their Top 25 Librarian Bloggers ranking study. Our blog is also the most popular law librarian blog according to the report. Thanks readers!

In answering the question, "which librarian bloggers have the biggest reach?", OEDb writes "our goal was to show — using objective data from reliable sources — which blogs are the most popular, according to visitor traffic and site backlinks. To this end, we used data for these four metrics to calculate the rankings: (1)Google PageRank, (2) Alexa Rank, (3) Technorati Authority, and (4) Bloglines Subscribers."

The OEDb study apparently excluded blogs by libraries. It would be huge undertaking but hopefully library blogs will be the subject of a future study using the same metrics. BTW, check out OEDb's recently launched Library 2.0-themed blog, called iLibrarian. [JH]

Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact for 2007

Texas law prof Brian Leiter has published Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact for 2007 in Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings. Leiter's study, which compiled citation data for all tenure-stream members of the academic faculty (for 2007-08) from 2000 to the present, is a ranking of the top 35 law faculties based on a standard "objective" measure of scholarly impact, namely, per capita citations to faculty scholarship. Leiter cautions that "scholarly impact as measured by citations has important limitations as a proxy for scholarly reputation." In this report he identifies six kinds of phenomena which may skew the correlation between citation and quality.

Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact for 2007 is one those rare citation studies coming out of the legal academy that exemplifies the precision of infometrics, not the carelessness of "info antics." [JH]

Amazon's Book Sales Ranking Game

The New York Times takes a look at the book sales rankings game on Amazon. From the article, The Highs and the Lows of Rankings on Amazon:

When Amazon created the system 10 years ago, it could hardly have known how greatly its list would change the dynamics of the publishing business (much the way the company itself did) or how hard writers and industry executives would work to game the system. Today the Amazon rankings list — and, to a lesser extent, a similar list on the Barnes & Noble Web site — is the subject of great microanalysis and some mystery.

[JH]

Solove's 2007 Law Professor Blogger Census

George Washington law prof Dan Solove has updated his Law Professor Blog census. According to his study there are now 308 law professor. Read more about it. [JH]

Professional Reading: What Is Your Sunstein Number?

Paul H. Edelman, Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Mathematics, and Tracey E. George, Vanderbilt Professor of Law, have produced one of the best infometric studies of legal scholarship I've seen in many, many years. Here's the abstract for their Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship:

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field – math – coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with Erdős but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an Erdős 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal Erdős. We crown Sunstein as the Legal Erdős and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s.

Brilliant! [JH]

Do Blogs Influence SSRN Downloads?

Paul Ohm says yes. Read all about it on The Volokh Conspiracy. [JH]

The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis

In The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis, Lokman I. Meho describes how the Web is allowing scientists and information providers to measure more accurately the impact of scholarly works and their authors because the vast majority of scientific papers are now available online. The paper provides a historical background of citation analysis, impact factor, new citation data sources (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus, NASA's Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, MathSciNet, ScienceDirect, SciFinder Scholar, Scitation/SPIN, and SPIRES-HEP), as well as h-index, g-index, and a-index.

This paper may be of interest to individuals who want to measure more accurately the impact of legal scholarship because the popularity of digital depositories has expanded the online availablity of legal scholarship and created new citation data sources. [JH]

Boalt Hall Law Student Joins the Circus of Info Antics

In Which Tenured Boalt Faculty Still Publish Articles, Berkeley law student Tom Fletcher has published a faculty productivity study using Boalt's faculty website, HeinOnline's All Journals database, and HeinOnline's Most Cited Journals database. It's an interesting (and gutsy) study but one that is seriously flawed for a number of reasons. Commenting on the study, Al Brophy observes that Fletcher's work fails to take into account articles published outside the legal literature. Brophy also notes that books are not covered but monographs are clearly outside the scope of Fletcher's study.

What I find interesting is that to the best of my knowledge, Fletcher's study is the first law student example of "info antics" in the legal blogosphere. One cannot blame Fletcher for this. He is, after all, just following examples set by law profs who have blogged the results of sloppy bibliometric research of the legal literature. [JH]

Top Law Schools Based on AAAS Membership

Texas Law Prof Brian Leiter has added a new study to his law school rankings website. This one assesses faculty quality based on American Academy of Arts & Sciences membership. As always Leiter's introductory paragraph discusses the significant limitations of this measure.

Which school is number 1? Yale Law School with 36% of the academic faculty elected to AAAS.

Brian Leiter is a prolific blogger. Check out: Leiter Reports: A Group Blog and Brian Leiter's Law School Reports. [JH]

A New Year's Resolution Proposal for SSRN

A Premiere Open Source Web Destination. In an Dec. 21, 2006 email announcement to subscribers, Gregg Gordon, SSRN President, reported that the SSRN depository increased its collection in 2006 by 31% to 139,000 documents, the number of authors in SSRN grew 27% to 70,000, and the number of downloads exceeded 3 million full text papers. In the world of open source document distribution systems, SSRN has established itself as one of the premiere web destinations for the dissemination of US scholarly works. Congratulations! In the coming years I hope to see SSRN grow by greater participation from foreign authors and institutions.

We Learn from Our Mistakes. Gordon writes that "[w]e have learned that SSRN is an important part in many people's lives and when we make a mistake, they let us know about it." From a librarian's perspective, one SSRN mistake is failing to include a completion date for submitted works. There is nothing wrong is allowing authors to upload works to the depository that are 2-3-5-10-20-25 years old but one unintended consequence of not providing this fundamental bibliographic data has been the bloated claims some law schools choose to make about their "scholarly productivity." Pointing out the difference between when works were actually produced from "productivity" claims based on when works were uploaded led to some rather spacious arguments in 2006 including, in playing the unfair rankings game, such claims were OK. They are not.

Productivity & Porn. Back in the day when I performed a fair amount of labor relations/labor economics analysis, I wrote "productivity is like porn, one knows it when one see it." One also knows "law porn" when one sees it. One would hope that law schools would moderate their marketing conduct by avoiding the appearance of impropriety but they are not required to do so. At times, I think I should contribute to the literature by performing a unit cost analysis of law school "scholarly productivity!"

Tomorrow's Research Today. Gordon writes that "[SSRN's] focus on providing Tomorrow's Research Today allows research to be read much sooner than ever before." [Emphasis added] Let's hope SSRN provides users with a readily available means of identifying recent scholarship by improving bibliographic control of its online depository. A cottage industry using upload and download statistics generated by SSRN became widespread in 2006; hopefully in 2007, SSRN-generated statistics will be more accurate. [JH]

Download Statistics - What Do They Tell Us?

Michael Organ, Project Manager for Research Online, an institutional repository at the University of Wollongong, Australia, performed on a six-month study of download and usage statistics for the digital collection. In Download Statistics - What Do They Tell Us? The Example of Research Online, the Open Access Institutional Repository at the University of Wollongong, Australia, Organ reports that Google was the primary access and referral point generating 95.8% of the measurable full text downloads of repository content.

Organ makes several interesting observations:

[T]he numbers available tell an interesting story. They point to the success of the repository software and open access protocols in making research output available on the Internet. Beyond this, the repositories themselves may have impacts that were never foreseen. For example, it has been observed that academics and researchers may be influenced by their download statistics to alter the direction of their research. On the basis of relatively low download statistics for a particular strand of research, they could decide to pursue a more popular strand, as identified to them by higher download rates. This would be a reflection of the increasing trend for research initiatives to be driven by business imperative and government policy, rather than as an expression of pure research. The usefulness of institutional repositories in this regard may assist with ensuring their long-term financial sustainability.

Yet the statistics available on Research Online also reveal that some of the best performing (i.e., most popular) items are from areas that do not figure in the traditional citation indexes, such as the creative arts and history.

With further research, Organ's observation about the popularity of items that do not figure in traditional citation indexes could dovetail nicely into Paul Caron's long tail analysis of SSRN downloads. See The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship and his TaxProf Blog post. [JH]

Rankings: Law Reviews v. Law Schools

TaxProf Blog editor and co-founder of the Law Professor Blogs Network Paul Caron has compilied a comparison of the Top 25 general-interest student-edited law reviews in the updated W&L rankings and their schools' U.S. News ranking. Check it out. [JH]

Academic Law Libraries Score High Marks with Students

In the 2007 edition of the Princeton Review's Best 170 Law Schools academic law libraries recieve high marks from students. A whopping 82% of the 170 law schools have "great research resources," "great library staffs," or both. No other survey items received such wide acclaim. Click on the pie chart for values and percentage breakdowns.

File under "nice to be appreciated." [JH]

Professional Reading: Measuring Total Reading of Journal Articles

In the October 2006 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Donald W. King, Carol Tenopir and Michael Clarke report on a survey they conducted utilizing "a little used but powerful method of observing reading by scientists. This method is designed to measure the amount of reading of specific journal articles and entire journals to complement exclusive observations of electronic journal hits and downloads, transaction logs, limited counts of citations to journals or articles and rough estimates of total amount of reading by professionals compared with total number of articles published." [JH]

Robinson on Content Analysis

In Why content analysis should be used more in Library and Information Studies research, Leith Robinson outlines the basic concepts and procedures of content analysis, then explores and denounces possible causes of its limited application in the LIS field. [JH]

Now Comes SSRN Download Data

Freshly minted from SSRN comes new download data. Fodder for more info antics? Hat tip to Brian Leiter who writes "SSRN downloads make for amusing chatter and fairly meaningless competition...but that's about all, I suspect." [JH]

"Info-antics" or How Chapman School of Law Beat Out Harvard to be Number 1 in a "Key Scholarly Output Ranking"

In an amazing display of hubris, the Chapman School of Law released the following press release on September 8, 2006:

Chapman School of Law Hits #1 in Key Scholarly Output Ranking
- Chapman Bests Harvard, NYU, Yale and Other Top Law School

ORANGE, Calif., Sept. 8, 2006 – In an increasingly important objective measure of scholarly productivity, the Chapman University School of Law has been ranked #1 in the nation in terms of the number of scholarly articles posted in the past 12 months on the Social Sciences Research Network, or SSRN (www.ssrn.com), a key online distribution network for legal scholarship.

The rankings, which became available this week based on data through September 1, 2006, list Harvard Law School at #2 , New York University at #3 and the University of Minnesota at #4. Rounding out the top ten were UCLA (#5), Yale (#6), Duke (#7), and the University of Chicago, University of Illinois and George Washington University (tied at #8). Chapman law professors also took top honors in the number of scholarly articles posted by author, out of 1,500 professors listed nationwide: Professor Jeremy Miller was #1, Professor John Eastman was #3, and Professor Donald Kochan was #21.

The Chapman law faculty also broke into the Top 100 on SSRN in terms of the number of articles downloaded over the past 12 months, an indication of the interest that the Chapman School of Law’s scholarship is generating among peers. Chapman ranked #71 out of more than 350 law schools worldwide in this important objective measure. In August, the Chapman tax law faculty ranked #8 in the nation in terms of SSRN downloads.

Parham Williams, dean of the Chapman School of Law, noted that the accomplishment was even more impressive than it first appeared, as the majority of Chapman faculty only began posting their scholarship on SSRN this past summer. “This is further proof,” Dean Williams noted, “that the Chapman law school is truly a community of scholars. That, combined with our commitment to small class size and student-focused personalized education, which resulted in a top ten ranking by the Princeton Review this past year in the 'Faculty Rocks' category, makes Chapman an exciting place for cutting-edge legal education and scholarship.”

Wow! How does Chapman Law best the likes of Harvard et al.?

Let's start by just comparing Chapman and Harvard for a moment using US News & World Report for our reference point. US News ranked Harvard the second best law school in the country in its 2006 report. Chapman, well, Chapman is a Fourth Tier school. Harvard's academic peers rated the school and its faculty 4.8 on a scale of 5.0. Chapman's peer assessment score is 1.5, only four law schools scored lower than Chapman in peer assessment.  I conclude, reasonably I think, that these two schools aren't exactly playing in the same league, not even in the same law school fantasy league.

Yet based on the press release's headline, one might think Chapman's faculty is kicking Harvard butt. With less than half as many law profs, Chapman's "scholarly output" was almost 17% higher than Harvard's. Click on the table (left) to view a larger version.

Hum. Let's flesh out Chapman Law's claims.

As Dean Williams states, it is absolutely true that "the majority of Chapman faculty only began posting their scholarship on SSRN this past summer." In fact, of the 145 Chapman Law documents posted in the SSRN digital depository in the last 12 months ending on September 1, 2006, a whooping 108 were submitted in August 2006 (and most of those were submitted on the last day of August). This has to be the most creative jag any law school faculty has ever experienced -- just-in-time productivity, no less. But a closer examination reveals that the only person who was really productive in Orange, California in August was the person who uploaded the documents to SSRN, documents whose dates of publication ranged from 2006 to ... wait for it ... 1981. Yes, 1981!

So is an objective measure of scholarly productivity the number of scholarly articles posted in SSRN in the last 12 months? Most of us might say "yes" but certainly we would only entertain the proposition if the documents were actually produced within a reasonable amount of time before being posted. In the case of Chapman Law, only 41 of the 145 SSRN documents can be dated to 2005-2006. That's only 28.3 percent. Click on the pie chart to enlarge it for viewing the entire breakdown.

This next chart illustrates the chronological distribution of Chapman Law documents posted in the last 12 months by date of publication, where publication date means publication in a journal, law review, or some similar publication. Where no such publication date is given, the SSRN-listed document is assumed to have seen the light of day on the date it was posted on SSRN. Granted, that assumption is not entirely valid because several documents have not even been viewed once, let alone downloaded.

I have also charted the Chapman Law claim as a percentage of total documents by certain milestones. Documents actually published (not SSRN-posted):

before 2005: 71.72%;

before 2000: 38.62%;

before 1995: 25.52%; and

before 1990: 11.03%.

Click on the image to view a larger version of the chart.

Remember, we are referring to a set of 145 documents. Clearly some very out-dated legal analysis just became available for reading via SSRN.

So which law school actually ranks number one in scholarly productivity as measured by documents posted on SSRN that were produced in a reasonable amount of time before being posted? Harvard Law, of course. There is no similar publication date range issue for Harvard's SSRN-posted documents.

It's not unusual for the have-nots in the academic prestige department to gulp the kool-aid of self-delusion. That's OK, I guess. It can even be the source of infotainment. Who doesn't enjoy a little "law porn", a dose of "Sextonism", every now and then? Chapman Law's "info-antics" is another example, but it is not just any sort of example. As law librarians we know that this silly side of document counts has become pandemic in the legal academy. Will it never end?

Closing Remarks
I hope the Chapman Law Library staff didn't spend its entire summer tracking down hardcopies for scanning!

Ultimately, what can we say about Chapman Law? I think it's fair to say, "this school posts!" [JH]

Sources:

• List of SSRN Top Law Schools (Beta) (September 1, 2006)
• SSRN Top Law Schools: Chapman University, School of Law Stats Page
• List of Chapman Law Profs and Librarians with Links to Their SSRN submissions
• SSRN Top Law Schools: Harvard Law School Stats Page
• List of Harvard Law Profs with Links to Their SSRN Submissions

Editor's Note: I leave the matter of Chapman Law's remarks about Law Profs Jeremy Miller, John Eastman, and Donald Kochan for you to ponder on your own and the matter of download counts to another day. Breaking the top 100 in terms of download counts isn't as much of a screamer as "Hit[ing] #1 in Key Scholarly Output Ranking."