Top-Ranked Journals Are Losing Their Share of Top-Cited Articles

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education's percolator reports that "Top-Ranked Journals Are Losing Their Share of Top-Cited Articles."  Cribbing from the Chron, a study "published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, found that in 1990, 45 percent of the top 5 percent of the most cited articles were published in journals whose impact factor was in the top 5 percent—publications like Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. By 2009, that rate had fallen to 36 percent...."

While that study is focused on science journals, I'd not be surprised to find a similar result in law reviews.   Some of the best cited articles in good but not super elite law journals win more citations than many articles in our most elite law journals.  I had some related thoughts on this last summer.

Comments

[Matthew L.M. Fletcher]

Hey, Al. I'm a clumsy self-promoter (not the absence of shameless from this sentence). I have noticed this, too, in Indian law articles. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the federal judiciary cited to the Indian law articles in elite journals far more than they do now (a much larger share of the citations, anyway). I'm no statistician, so I am merely counting cases, but it seemed significant to me. My paper is the inaugural essay for the Seattle University Law School's online American Indian Law Journal, so I can't link to it yet. But soon.

Matthew

[Alfred Brophy]

Very interesting stuff, Matthew. When your article's out, I want to talk about it.