Bernard Black and Paul Caron have posted to SSRN a paper entitled Rankin g Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance. Here's the abstract:
There are several methods for ranking the scholarly performance of law faculties, including reputation surveys (U.S. News, Leiter); publication counts (Lindgren & Seltzer, Leiter); and citation counts (Eisenberg & Wells, Leiter). Each offers a useful but partial picture of faculty performance. We explore here whether the new ?beta? SSRN-based measures (number of downloads and number of posted papers) can offer a different, also useful, albeit also partial, picture. Our modest claim is that SSRN-based measures can address some of the deficiencies in these other measures and thus play a valuable role in the rankings tapestry. For example, SSRN offers real-time data covering most American law schools and many foreign law schools, while citation and publication counts appear sporadically and cover a limited number of U.S. schools. The SSRN measures favor work with audiences across disciplines and across countries, while other measures are more law- centric and U.S.-centric. SSRN is relatively new and thus favors younger scholars and improving schools, while other measures favor more established scholars and schools. At the same time, the SSRN measures have important field and other biases, as well as gaming risks. We assess the correlations among the different measures, both on an aggregate and on a per faculty member basis. We find that all measures are strongly correlated; that total and per faculty measures are highly correlated; and that SSRN measures based on number of papers are highly correlated with measures based on number of downloads. Among major schools, all measures also correlate with school size.
Interesting stuff.
Now for the self-promotion. I've taken the liberty of reprinting one of their tables (from page 45):
Table 10. Top 25 SSRN Corporate Faculty Rankings (August 2005)
Bernard Black (Texas) 1 2 2 3 Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard) 2 3 1 1 Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA) 3 6 3 5 John Coffee, Jr. (Columbia) 4 8 4 9 Ronald Gilson (Stanford) 5 10 8 18 Reinier Kraakman (Harvard) 6 13 6 14 Lynn Stout (UCLA) 7 18 9 19 Margaret Blair (Vanderbilt) 8 19 13 30 William Bratton (Georgetown) 9 22 12 27 Jesse Fried (Berkeley) 10 23 10 20 Mark Roe (Harvard) 11 24 14 31 Roberta Romano (Yale) 12 25 5 11 Steven Schwarcz (Duke) 13 28 17 49 Stephen Choi (Berkeley) 14 29 15 32 Larry Ribstein (Illinois) 15 30 11 24 Frank Partnoy (San Diego) 16 33 19 66 Allen Ferrell (Harvard) 17 42 7 15 Mitu Gulati (Georgetown) 18 52 16 36 Katharina Pistor (Columbia) 19 55 18 65 Adam Pritchard (Michigan) 20 69 24 102 John Coates (Harvard) 21 81 - 175 Curtis Milhaupt (Columbia) 22 90 23 98 Guhan Subramanian (Harvard) 23 93 - 134 George Triantis (Virginia) 24 96 - 188 Donald Langavoort (Georgetown) 25 110 - 142 The numbers after one's name refer to, respectively, one's rank among corporate law professors and all law professors for all-time number of downloads and recent downloads of one's papers from SSRN. So, for example, I'm 3rd among corporate law professors for all- time downlloads, sixth among all law professors professors for all-time downloads, third among corporate law professors for recent downloads, and fifth among all law professors for recent downloads. Note that my friend and colleague Lynn Stout and her frequent co-author Margaret Blair are right in the hunt too. UCLA's law faculty as a whole ranks 5th among law schools for SSRN downloads. Our tax faculty is doing great too, by the way, with 5 professors among the top 25.
