Google Scholar has released its 2018 Scholar Metrics data, and the new law review rankings are available here. I have published these rankings for law reviews for most of the past several years, although they have often stimulated some controversy.
This year, I decided to compare the Scholar Metrics results with the widely used Washington and Lee law review rankings. Both methodologies have strengths and weaknesses, which is why a combination of multiple ranking systems is preferable to any single ranking (see, for example, Bryce Newell's composite ranking here).
I collected the Washington and Lee "combined" rankings for the top 250 law reviews from the Washington and Lee website (based on total citations by journals), as well as the Google Scholar h5-index for the same journals. I plotted one score against the other in the plot below, with a few points labeled (more on this below). Note that a fair number of journals were not available in Google Scholar, especially among the less-cited ones, so the data includes fewer than 250 total journals.
The two measures tracked one another quite well, which is perhaps not surprising as both are based on citations. However, the Google Scholar data reveals some blind spots in the Washington and Lee rankings. As the latter are based on citations from law reviews, they tend to discount some elite "law and" or "interdisciplinary" journals. Thus, the Journal of Legal Studies, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, The Journal of Law & Economics, and the American Journal of International Law, appear only average in the W&L rankings. In fact, however, most of these are considered very selective journals. Of the flagship law reviews, only the University of Chicago Law Review has a similar pattern, but not as extreme.
Although faculty who publish in the relevant fields know the reputation of these journals well, I have often heard them compared by generalist faculty unfavorably to even average flagship law reviews. I hope this data helps to curb the blind spots that we can all have for specialty journals outside our areas of expertise.
In my own area of empirical legal studies, I find it notable that the upstart Journal of Empirical Legal Studies has finally caught (and perhaps even passed, depending on which measure is used) the Journal of Legal Studies, which has long served as a standard-bearer for empirical and law & economics work.
The numbers themselves are available here, for those interested.
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