U.S. News & World Report is the global authority in education rankings. They specifically rank the Best Law Schools based on a number of factors including LSAT scores, job placement success, student-faculty ratio, and much more. U.S. News has been collaborating with the Hein Company to potentially create a new ranking, which would evaluate the scholarly impact of law schools across the United States.
Analyzing Scholarly Impact
Robert Morse, the Chief Data Strategist for U.S. News and author of the Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings blog, states: “The intent is to analyze each law school’s scholarly impact based on a number of accepted indicators that measure its faculty’s productivity and impact using citations, publications and other bibliometric measures.” Read more in Morse’s recent blog post.
To obtain these metrics, U.S. News is asking each law school to provide the names and other details of its Fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. These names will then be linked to citations and publications of these individuals that were published in HeinOnline in the past five years. The mean citation per faculty member, the median citation per faculty member, and the total number of publications will be used to create a scholarly impact ranking of law schools.
It is important to note that scholarly impact will not affect the overall Best Law Schools rankings published by U.S. News in the late winter or early spring 2019. It is being considered as a separate law school ranking metric during the 2019 calendar year.
To learn more about Hein’s ScholarCheck features, check out these blog posts:
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