Research Guides: Law Faculty Publishing: A Guide: Journals: Rankings Impact and Immediacy Factors

Journal Prestige

Selecting the journal(s) to send your manuscript to is an important part of the academic publishing process. Here are the main criteria to consider:

Determining Prestige of Journal

Impact Factor, Immediacy Index and Eigenfactor

In considering the prestige of a journal, two common factors are considered:

Impact factor
Immediacy Index.

In addition, in the sciences, the Eigenfactor may also play a part.

Spec Kit 346: Scholarly Output Assessment Activities by Ruth Lewis, Cathy C. Sarli & Amy M. Suiter
Call Number: Online via ARL website
ISBN: 9781594079443
Publication Date: 2015
This SPEC Kit explores current ARL member library activities that help authors manage their scholarly identities, provide options for creating and disseminating scholarly outputs, offer strategies to enhance discoverability of scholarly outputs, help authors efficiently track scholarly outputs and impact, provide resources and tools to help authors assess their scholarly impact, create publication reports and social network maps for reporting purposes, and offer guidance and training on new trends and tools for reporting of impact.

Finding Prestige Stats

Law Journal Submissions and Ranking The Washington & Lee Law School Library produces this list of law journals by subject, country and other factors, and allows users to rank journals by impact factor or immediacy index. (Both are based on citation counts more or less, see ranking methodology). Provides contact and submission information.
Most Cited Journals in HeinOnline This top 100 list is based on HeinOnline's citator feature called ScholarCheck. You can also use ScholarCheck to create your own metric.
Google Scholar Metrics Rankings display include the h5-index and the h5-median for each included publication. To learn more about Google Scholar Metrics and its use of h5-index, go to its explanatory page.
Scimago Journal Rank The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996. Law is one of the subject categories under Journal Rankings.
Eigenfactor Journal Rankings The Eigenfactor.org website provides a searchable database of Eigenfactor scores and Article Influence scores for the numerous journals covered in Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports. A journal's Eigenfactor score is Eigenfactor.org's measure of the journal's total importance to the scientific community. A journal's Article Influence score is a measure of the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication.

Articles on Law Journal Rankings and Citation Analysis

All article links are to HeinOnline unless otherwise indicated.

Arthur Austin, The Reliability of Citation Counts in Judgments on Promotion, Tenure, and Status, 35 Ariz. L. Rev. 829 (1993). What do citations really mean? In the sciences they may serve as credible "signposts" of influence and history. Science is a closed community in which scholarship discipline is strict. Law is not. Evaluate citation counts with caution and reservation. The bottom line is still scholarship, not citations.
Ian Ayres & Fredrick E. Vars, Determinats of Citations to Articles in Elite Law Reviews, 29 J. Legal Stud. 427 (2000). This article analyzes the determinants of citations to pieces published from 1980 to 1995 in Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. We also rank articles by number of citations using regressions controlling for time since publication, journal, and subject area. To summarize a few of our results: citations per year peak at 4 years after publication, and an article receives half of its expected total lifetime citations after 4.6 years; appearing first in an issue is a significant advantage; international law articles receive fewer citations; jurisprudence articles are cited more often; articles by young, female, or minority authors are more heavily cited. Articles with shorter titles, fewer footnotes per page, and without equations have significantly more citations than other articles. Total citations generally increase with an article's length, but citations per published page peak at 53 pages.
Robert C. Bird, Special Report: Legal Scholarship in Business Schools, 53 Am. Bus. L.J. 9 (2016) (OhioLINK EJC article). Part I of this article examines the publishing practices of law journals and business journals. Using hand-coded data from select marketing, accounting, finance, and business law journals, this part compares the authorship and publication practices of these disciplines. Part I also reports anonymized results of a study of the journal list standards at approximately fifty business schools and briefly discusses the utility of various external journal ranking systems. Part II explores the publishing practices of top scholars in business law. This part gathers data on the research output of sixty-nine high-quality business law scholars, and reports the data by faculty rank, annual productivity, and the outlets in which the top scholars publish their work.
Alfred L. Brophy, Law [Review]'s Empire: The Assessment of Law Reviews and Trends in Legal Scholarship, 39 Conn. L. Rev. 101 (2006) Professor Brophy discusses using law review citations as a way of providing an assessment of the quality of the parent institutions. Tables provide rankings.
Alfred L. Brophy, The Signaling Value of Law Reviews: An Exploration of Citations and Prestige,36 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 229 (2009) This article reports a study of citations to every article published in 1992 in thirteen leading law journals. It uses citations as a proxy of article quality and then compares the citations across journals.
Gregory Scott Crespi, Ranking International and Comparative Law Journals: A Survey of Expert Opinion, 31 Int'l L. 869 (1997) Professor Crespi conducted an opinion survey of senior scholars in the international and comparative law areas as to the relative academic reputations of the specialty journals in those fields. The survey was designed to obtain sufficient information to assign rankings to to these journals, thereby providing guidance to scholars seeking the most prestigious placement for their work.
Gregory Scott Crespi, Ranking the Environmental Law, Natural Resources Law, and Land Use Planning Journals: A Survey of Expert Opinion, 23 Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol'y Rev. 273 (1998) Faculty members who seek tenure and/or promotion are advised to publish their work in the most prestigious journals possible. They cannot do so effectively, however, unless they are aware of the relative professional stature of those journals that may be interested in their work. The author recently conducted an opinion survey of senior scholars who research and teach in forty student and peer-edited scholarly journals specializing in environmental law, natural resources law, or land use planning topics.
Gregory Scott Crespi, Ranking Specialized Law Reviews: A Methodological Critique, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 837 (1999) Professor Crespi discusses how rankings can be devised to encourage the future production of valuable scholarship and considers the merits of alternative ranking methodologies. He concludes that the desired incentives for editors and authors are best achieved if journals are ranked on the basis of expert evaluations of scholarly value where feasible, and otherwise on the basis of the frequency in which journals are cited in other publications.
John Doyle, Ranking Legal Periodicals and Some Other Numeric Uses of the Westlaw and Lexis Periodical Databases, 23 Legal Reference Serv. Q. 1 (2004). This article is an excursion into some arcane realms of the JLR and ALLUS databases on Westlaw and Lexis and their use for extracting statistical information about legal periodicals and articles. This article delves into the prestige of legal periodicals which are reflected by (and encouraged by) ranking studies, and in particular the Washington and Lee citation count study which is based on citations from the JLR and ALLCASES databases.
John Doyle, The Law Reviews: Do Their Paths of Glory Lead but to the Grave?,10 J. App. Prac. & Process 179 (2009).
Tracey E. George & Chris Guthrie, An Empirical Evaluation of Specialized Law Reviews, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 813 (1999). The sudden, rapid, and widespread increase in the number of specialized law reviews has attracted relatively little scholarly attention even though it is the most significant development in legal academic publishing in the second half of the twentieth century. As a consequence, there is a dearth of information about the proliferation, significance, and status of specialized reviews. In this Article, the authors attempt to fill this information gap by documenting the rise of the specialized review and by providing an empirical ranking of the top 100 specialized reviews.
Tracey E. George & Chris Guthrie, In Defense of Author Prominence: A Reply to Crespi and Korobin, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 877 (1999). The authors respond to Gregory Scott Crespi, who provided a critique of the methodology employed and the results obtained. They also respond to Russell Korobkin who focused his critique on the potential implications of their rankings (and rankings more generally). In this reply, they briefly address the more significant criticisms each of them raises.
Joanna L. Grossman, Feminist Law Journals and the Rankings Conundrum, 12 Colum. J. Gender & L. 522 (2003). Faculty members clearly make choices about where to publish, and perhaps even what to write and whom to cite, based in part on published rankings, which deem schools and individuals "productive," "prolific," or "academically reputable" based in part on those choices. It is here that the conflict between rankings and feminist law journals comes into sharper focus. Each individual set of rankings-bar none-creates a disincentive to publish in feminist law journals.
Robert M. Jarvis & Phyllis G. Coleman, Ranking Law Reviews: An Empirical Analysis Based on Author Prominence, 39 Ariz. L. Rev. 15 (1997) Efforts to rank the law reviews of American Law Schools have relied on either citation counts or usage surveys.Unfortunately, once one gets past the elite journals, the number of "hits" (i.e., the instances in which a periodical is either cited or used) drops off so markedly that it is impossible to obtain meaningful rankings. Moreover, citation counts can be badly skewed by a single article. As a result, studies that rely on either citation counts or usage surveys are useful only in determining the identity of the top journals. To overcome these problems, the authors ranked law reviews based on the national prominence of the authors of their lead articles.
Robert M. Jarvis & Phyllis Coleman, Ranking Law Reviews by Author Prominence—Ten Years Later, 99 Law Libr. J. 573 (2007). In an update to their 1997 survey, Professors Jarvis and Coleman again rank student-edited law reviews based on the prominence of their lead article authors. This time, Yale was found to have the greatest drawing power followed by Harvard and Columbia.
Russell Korobkin, Ranking Journals: Some Thoughts on Theory and Methodology, 26 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 851 (1999) This article describes how rankings can be used to create a status competition among journal editors that can, in turn, provide journal authors with an incentive to produce more valuable scholarly articles. It considers the merits of alternative ranking methodologies. It concludes that the desired incentives for editors and authors are best achieved if journals are ranked on the basis of expert evaluations of scholarly value where feasible, and otherwise on the basis of the frequency in which journals are cited in other publications.
James Leonard, Seein' the Cites: A Guided Tour of Citation Patterns in Recent American Law Review Articles, 34 St. Louis U.L.J. 181 (1990). This article presents the results of a study of citations to law reviews from a sample of law journal articles published in 1986. The goal of this project was to investigate why some law reviews are cited more often than others as scholarly authority in law reviews. Perhaps citation frequency is affected, in the aggregate, by an author's faculty affiliation, the school conferring his law degree, and so forth. This article attempted to judge the strength of these and other considerations on a law review's scholarly impact.
Douglas B. Maggs, Concerning the Extent to Which the Law Review Contributes to the Development of the Law, 3 S. Cal. L. Rev. 181 (1930) One of the earlier articles on citation analysis, this article provides detailed tables of the law review articles cited in published court opinions over a period of five to forty-eight months.
Ronen Perry, The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: A Critical Appraisal of Ranking Methods, 11 Va. J.L. & Tech 1 (Winter 2006) This article offers an introductory discussion of the goals of law review rating, and the essential attributes of reliable and beneficial ranking methods, followed by a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the advantages and shortcomings of the various methods that can be used to assess the relative value of American law reviews. It rejects direct evaluation of quality, either by an expert committee or a general survey, and indirect evaluation of quality by authors' national prominence, article rejection rates, editors' academic aptitudes, and library or database usage. It then explains that if properly adjusted and carefully administered, citation-based methods might afford quantitative measures of various aspects of academic quality. It also discusses the weaknesses of complex ranking methods in which several indicia of quality are taken into account.
Ronen Perry, The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: Refinement and Implementation, 39 Conn. L. Rev. 1 (2006) This article offers a refinement of the theoretical framework and implementation of that framework provided in the author's previous article on ranking American Law Journals. It proposes, defends, and implements a complex ranking method for general-interest student-edited law reviews, based on a judicious weighting of normalized citation frequency and normalized impact factor. It then analyzes the distribution of journals' scores, and the diminishing marginal difference between them. Finally, it examines the correlation between law schools' positions in the U.S. News & World Report 2006 ranking and their flagship law reviews' positions under the proposed method and between these schools' overall scores and their law reviews' final scores.
Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, International Ranking of Law Journals—Can it be Done and at What Cost?, 29 Legal Stud. 678 (2009) (Article online via Ebsco Host) This paper discusses issues associated with international ranking of law journals. Some catalysts for the development of international journal ranking are highlighted, reasons for ranking are discussed and a range of ranking methodologies are analysed. The paper illustrates the problems associated with international journal rankings and the negative consequences that inevitably flow from such exercises.