The Relationship Between the Sisk Rankings and Law Review Citations

Something seems rather, well earth-shaking about the Sisk rankings.  They're being spoken about all over the place.  though not yet at taxprof that I've seen.  Paul Caron must be planning something big -- perhaps a post look at the schools with the biggest gaps between the US News Peer Assessment ranks and Sisk rank?  Time will tell. Yes, even at taxprof.

In the meantime, I want to follow up my post from yesterday and talk about the relationship between Sisk's weighted scores (the mean of citations to work of  tenured faculty from 2005 through January 15, 2010 at each school times 2, plus the median) and the citations to each school's main law journal from 2002 to 2009.  The latter are available at John Doyle's fabulous Washington and Lee Law Library site.

The below correlations suggest a strong relationship between the Sisk et alia weighted score and the number of citations to the primary law journal reported by Doyle for the 69 schools. (California-Irvine was omitted.)  Three law reviews with extremely high citation counts and large weighted scores inflate the standard Pearsonian correlation (.85) -- which looked at Sisk's scores and Doyle's citations, so I re-ran with Spearman’s rank correlation (.72) -- which looked at Sisk's ranks, not scores, and Doyle's ranks, not scores.  Spearman's is likely a better estimate of the relationship.

Citation counts to a school's main law journal do not necessarily provide what the Leiter and Sisk scores do: a measure of the scholarly productivity of the faculty of a school.  Thus, even young schools with recently established law reviews can obtain high Scholarly Impact Scores.  However, what I find important -- and what I wrote about yesterday -- is how highly correlated these measures are.

(Regular Pearson r)  r    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .85    69    < .0001

(Spearman rho) rho    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .72    69    < .0001

I have some more thoughts on the use of citations to law school's main law journals to gage schools in this paper.  I'm now thinking that Sisk's faculty scholarly impact scores and recent citations to a law school's main law review (and perhaps secondary law reviews, too), may be used together to help give a good measure of the academic quality of law schools.  When used together with US News peer assessment scores and data on student quality, we  may begin to refine our picture of  a school's academic quality.

Update: Taking a little bit of my advice, I've run a couple these correlations again while excluding some of the outliers -- the really well-performing schools.

The correlations above rerun after excluding the top 3 schools (in weighted score) are:

(Regular Pearson r)  r    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .80    66    < .0001

(Spearman rho) rho    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .68    66    < .0001

The above correlations rerun after excluding the top 6 schools (in weighted score) are:

(Regular Pearson r)  r    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .73    63    < .0001

(Spearman rho) rho    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .64    63    < .0001

The above correlations rerun after excluding the top 7 schools (in weighted score) are:

(Regular Pearson r)  r    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .70    62    < .0001

(Spearman rho) rho    N          p

Weighted score vs Journ02-09    .62    62    < .0001

Comments

[anon]

Check again. Caron discussed this several days ago, although he didn't call them the "Sisk Rankings":

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/09/the-top-70.html

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks, anon--I missed that.