Robert Anderson of Pepperdine has a terrific post up at Witnesseth that uses google rankings for law reviews. It's definitely worth a look (and I'm happy that it fits closely with the law review citations part of "Ranking Law Schools with LSATs, Employment Outcomes, and Law Review Citations"). Anderson ranks more than 200 journals based on their H5 index (based on the Hirsch index) -- which is how many articles (h) over the last five years have been cited h number of times. If you have 37 articles that have been published in the last five years cited at least 37 times each, you have an H5 index of 37 -- that's what the Harvard Law Review has. Mighty impressive. Looking down Anderson's list (if you click on the H number you get a list of the articles from each review that have been cited at least H times), I'm reminded again how difficult it is to get citations.
H/t Connecticut Law Review (@ConnLRev), which is tweeting about this (they're ranked number 26).
Just one nitpick: Anderson's rankings seem to be by an average of the H-5 Index and H-5 Median (the middle number of cites per article among those articles in the H-5 index). So, it's not exactly a straight up H-5 ranking or one with median as a tie breaker (as Google Scholar seems to do). If you compare U Penn's ranking in the Google Scholar rank with its rank in Anderson's method, you will see what I mean.
As for whether doing it this way is better than Google Scholar's normal method, I'm not sure. An average of the median seems to undo some of the benefits of h-indexing in the first place (namely, to minimize outsized citation effects of a small number of articles on a journal's rank).
Posted by: Former Editor | August 29, 2014 at 10:36 AM