A couple of years back Gregory Sisk's study of law faculty scholarly impact received a lot of attention. You may recall that the methodology was largely based Brian Leiter's previous study of the top 25 faculties. It created a weighted score by multiplying the mean citations of the tenured faculty over the past five years by 2 and then adding the median.
Here at the facutly lounge I blogged about a bunch of the correlates of Sisk's data on citations to tenured faculty scholarship with such variables as law review citations (and here) and student LSAT scores. There was much fun to be had with the scatterplots of Sisk's data and other variables. Sisk and Company are now getting geared up for another study. The details are here.
Sisk and Company are putting schools on notice here that they need to carefully check the names of their faculty roster before the study is run; I seem to recall there were some issues with that last time around.
One request that I'd make -- and I think this is pretty serious -- is that schools provide, so that Sisk's data collectors can search under, all the names that each faculty member uses. Many women have published using more than one last name; similarly, many faculty of both genders are identified in articles by nick-names instead of our full first name. People take these sorts of studies seriously and it's important to make sure that this is as correct as possible.
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