As regular readers of this blog know, I publish monthly rankings of Tax Profs as measured by downloads of their papers from SSRN, and Ted Seto publishes here similar rankings of tax faculties and graduate tax faculties.  Today’s New York Times hsa an article on the SSRN rankings, Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings, Too, by Naom Cohn:

First came the Amazon book rankings, and word leaked out that perhaps some vaunted writers spent more time than you would think checking how popular they were, hour by hour. Then newspapers started tracking the most popular articles on their sites and journalists, it was said, spent more time than you would think watching their rankings, hour by hour.

But would you believe that academics could become caught up in such petty, vain competition? Of course, you say. Still, short of hanging out in the stacks at the library and peeking over shoulders, the pursuit of that particular vanity had to wait for the Internet, and the creation of the Social Science Research Network, an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading. …

[W]ith a precision common to the digital age, its rankings of downloads can be sliced and diced in many ways with only a click: most downloads over all or most downloads in the last 12 months, either by article, by author or by institution.

The network was not created to be a Top 40 list for academics, said Michael C. Jensen, its chairman and one of its founders, but it has turned out that way. “We are interested in creating a site that would allow authors and papers to get a reputation and give information to readers on what to devote their scarce time to,” he said.

The research network raises the same big questions about what is lost and what is gained by removing the barriers to being heard in the public square. Is music distributed on MySpace, without benefit of a record label’s guiding hand, better or worse? Is journalism helped by the wide reach of bloggers, or hurt as professionalism disappears? Is it good that research that has not been reviewed by peers can be found so easily and looks just the same as gold-star approved work? …

Some argue that amid this storm of information, traditional gatekeepers (top-20 law schools, nationally known newspapers, academic journals) become even more important, drawing attention to the work that comes with the best credentials. But Mr. Sunstein begged to differ. “The gatekeepers matter,” he said, “but don’t have the enormous power to deny people a large audience.”