SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 663 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base. Here is the new list (through August 18, 2010) of the Top 25 U.S. Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and recent downloads (within the past 12 months):
Note that this ranking includes full-time tax professors with at least one tax paper on SSRN, and all papers (including non-tax papers) by these tax professors are included in the SSRN data.
Although the above chart lists only U.S. tax professors, Tax Prof John Prebble (Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Law) passed a significant milestone recently: he has posted more papers (210) than any other law professor in the world. (He also would rank #9 this month in recent downloads.)
The other SSRN ranking categories are:
These rankings, of course, are imperfect measures of faculty scholarly performance — as are the existing ranking methodologies of reputation surveys, productivity counts, and citation counts. Our modest claim in our article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006) (Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings), is that the SSRN data can play a role in faculty rankings along with these other measures. Bill Henderson (Indiana) thinks we are too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.
For my recent articles on what SSRN downloads can tell us about the current state and future of legal scholarship, and about the relationship between scholarship and blogging, see:
- The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 38 (2006)
- Are Scholars Better Bloggers? — Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025 (2006)
For Ted Seto’s faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:
