Ranking Law Journals and the Limits of Journal Citation Reports

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. rankings, journals, research evaluation JEL: O31, C15, D02, L89 ∗ Eisenberg is Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Statistical Science, Cornell University and a member of the Faculty, International Programme in Institutions, Economics and Law (IEL); Wells is Charles A. Alexander Professor of Statistical Science, Professor Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology and Professor of Social Statistics, Cornell University, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Health Services Research at Weill Medical School, and Elected Member of the Cornell Law School Faculty.