Fans of The Wire, the greatest television show ever, know all too well that how we measure success can ultimately corrupt how we define it. So we owe Villanova Professor Cannan a debt for his efforts to explain how current measures of scholarly impact are deeply flawed and how we might do better.

Law Library Journal, Volume 117, No. 4, 2025, pp 364-387

24 Pages Posted: 7 Oct 2025

John Cannan

Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law

Date Written: October 06, 2025

Abstract Moving Beyond Traditional Legal Scholarship Impact Rankings

Legal academia is likely stuck with law faculty scholarly impact rankings-that is, using citation counts to judge a law faculty’s reputation and influence. But why can’t we produce better, more useful studies? Current rankings rely on outdated methods. Moreover, these rankings-touted by their creators as objective-suffer from long-standing flaws. They are also grounded in limited understandings of legal citations as sources of information. This paper calls on law librarians to advance legal citation research by adopting methodologies from other information sciences and developing legal citation taxonomies and theories.

Keywords: law journals, Legal citations, Law faculty rankings, Scholarly impact, Legal scholarly impact, Citation analysis, Information science, Citation taxonomy, Law librarians, Academic metrics, Bibliometrics, Legal publishing, Legal academic pubishing

Suggested Citation:

Cannan, John, Moving Beyond Traditional Legal Scholarship Impact Rankings (October 06, 2025). Law Library Journal, Volume 117, No. 4, 2025, pp 364-387, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5571061 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5571061