Uncertainty in Law School Citation Rankings

Abstract

Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops an approach for considering whether differences between faculty citations are significant. Statistical tests demonstrate that the distribution of citations within faculties closely follows the normal distribution, subject to small adjustments. This suggest a simple test for comparing faculties: whether they could be drawn from distributions with the same log mean. Under this approach, the geometric mean of citations is the most efficient measure for summarizing faculty productivity. Using citation data collected from Hein Online, this article provides a citation ranking for 195 law schools in the United States. However, most differences between peer schools are statistically insignificant. Except for the highest-ranked faculties, most law schools have dozens of statistically indistinguishable peer schools.

Keywords: citations, law school rankings

JEL Classification: I23