Twitter has been abuzz ever since the American Association of Law Libraries weekday KnowItAALL newsletter released our webpage dedicated to showcasing ScholarRank’s Top 250 Authors in HeinOnline. Institutions are tweeting about their faculty rankings, and discussions have opened up about which authors stand out among the more than 750,000 authors in HeinOnline’s journal index. Today, we’re going to dive into this topic and give you the 411 on HeinOnline’s ScholarRank.

What Is ScholarRank?

ScholarRank is an overall ranking based on the calculation of five HeinOnline ScholarCheck metrics. The Z-score for each of the five metrics is taken and then averaged; the final average is entered into standard competition ranking to produce the overall ScholarRank for each author. The raw data and final rankings are updated on a monthly basis and can be found on the HeinOnline author’s profile page.

How we Calculate ScholarRank

The raw data is gathered for each of the five metrics, which are:

• Cited by Articles (0-5 Years)
  This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline within the past five years only. Citation sources include the Bluebook, Prince’s Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
• Cited by Articles (5+ Years) This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by other articles in HeinOnline beyond the past five years. Citation sources include the Bluebook, Prince’s Bieber Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
• Cited by Cases (0-5 Years) This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by cases available in HeinOnline or via Fastcase within the past five years only.
• Cited by Cases (5+ Years) This metric counts the number of times this author has been cited by cases available in HeinOnline or via Fastcase beyond the past five years.
• Accessed (Past 12 Months) This metric is used to account for relevancy & recency and counts the cumulative number of times an author’s articles have been accessed by HeinOnline users within a rolling 12-month period. In order for an author’s article to count as accessed, the article must be clicked from either search results or by browsing to the article, or retrieved using the citation navigator.

For further information about how the algorithm is calculated, visit our Knowledge Base.

What’s New with ScholarRank

Although ScholarRank’s Top 250 Authors isn’t exactly new, it’s an exploding topic on Twitter among faculty members and institutions.

But, we did add something new this week! We decided to break down the list even further. Now users can see authors’ affiliated institutions. Wondering how to locate all of this information? Simply enter the Law Journal Library and click on the Most-Cited tab.

Next, click on the link to ScholarRank’s Top 250 Authors.

Each ranking includes the author’s name and institution. Institution or organizations are only displayed beneath authors who have enhanced their Author Profile Page in HeinOnline to indicate such.

HeinOnline’s ScholarRank is unrelated to the forthcoming law school ranking from U.S. News.

Quick Pro Tip

Do you author articles found in HeinOnline? Author Profile Pages are an excellent way to showcase and promote an author’s scholarly work. This page automatically displays a list of an author’s articles and ScholarCheck statistics, and can be enhanced to include a photo, biographical information, and links to the author’s website and social media accounts. To learn more about how enhance an author profile, check out this blog post.

In case you missed it, we made it even easier to edit your own author profile page. To learn more about this new editing feature, check out this recent blog post.

For help editing or enhancing your author profile page, contact our dedicated support team at 800-277-6995, email us at holsupport@wshein.com, or chat directly with a HeinOnline expert.