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Ranking Law Journals and the Limits of Journal Citation Reports

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  • Eisenberg, Theodore
  • Wells, Martin T.

Abstract

Rankings of schools, scholars, and journals emphasize ordinal rank. Journal rankings published by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are widely used to assess research quality, which influences important decisions by academic departments, universities, and countries. We study refereed law journal rankings by JCR, Washington and Lee Law Library (W&L), and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Both JCR’s and W&L’s multiple measures of journals can be represented by a single latent factor. Yet JCR’s rankings are uncorrelated with W&L’s. The differences appear to be attributable to underrepresentation of law journals in JCR’s database. We illustrate the effects of database bias on rankings through case studies of three elite journals, the Journal of Law & Economics, Supreme Court Review, and the American Law & Economics Review. Cluster analysis is a supplement to ordinal ranking and we report the results of a cluster analysis of law journals. The ARC does organize journals into four large groups and provides generally reasonable rankings of journals. But anomalies exist that could be avoided by checking the ARC groups against citation-based measures. Entities that rank should use their data to provide meaningful clusters rather than providing only ordinal ranks.

Suggested Citation

  • Eisenberg, Theodore & Wells, Martin T., 2013. "Ranking Law Journals and the Limits of Journal Citation Reports," IEL Working Papers 12, Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS.
  • Handle: RePEc:uca:ucaiel:12
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Jevin West & Theodore Bergstrom & Carl T. Bergstrom, 2010. "Big Macs and Eigenfactor scores: Don't let correlation coefficients fool you," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(9), pages 1800-1807, September.
    2. Christoph Neuhaus & Werner Marx & Hans‐Dieter Daniel, 2009. "The publication and citation impact profiles of Angewandte Chemie and the Journal of the American Chemical Society based on the sections of Chemical Abstracts: A case study on the limitations of the J," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(1), pages 176-183, January.
    3. Currie, Russell R. & Pandher, Gurupdesh S., 2011. "Finance journal rankings and tiers: An Active Scholar Assessment methodology," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 7-20, January.
    4. Philip M. Davis, 2008. "Eigenfactor: Does the principle of repeated improvement result in better estimates than raw citation counts?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(13), pages 2186-2188, November.
    5. Yong Bao & Melody Lo & Franklin G. Mixon, 2010. "General-interest versus specialty journals: Using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(2), pages 345-353.
    6. Imad Moosa, 2011. "The demise of the ARC journal ranking scheme: an ex post analysis of the accounting and finance journals," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 51(3), pages 809-836, September.
    7. Eisenberg, Theodore & Wells, Martin T, 1998. "Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(2), pages 373-413, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Mu-hsuan Huang & Wang-Ching Shaw & Chi-Shiou Lin, 2019. "One category, two communities: subfield differences in “Information Science and Library Science” in Journal Citation Reports," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 1059-1079, May.
    2. Haley, M. Ryan & McGee, M. Kevin, 2020. "Jointly valuing journal visibility and author citation count: An axiomatic approach," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1).
    3. M. Ryan Haley & M. Kevin McGee, 2023. "A flexible functional method for jointly valuing journal visibility and author citation count," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(6), pages 3337-3346, June.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    rankings; journals; research evaluation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General
    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • L89 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Other

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