Sisk: The Phillips & Yoo Citations Rankings: Different, Not Better

Following up on last week's posts (links below): Gregory Sisk (St. Thomas (Minnesota)):

Believing as I do both that U.S. News rankings are flawed (and thus should be supplemented by multiple other ranking approaches) and that scholarly impact or quality is multi-dimensional (and thus also benefits from a diversity of approaches), I too welcome any thoughtful new attempt to evaluate the meaning of citations to legal scholarship.  James Phillips and John Yoo have certainly added a thoughtful contribution to scholarly rankings.  At the same time, I think Brian Leiter’s conclusion is right – the Phillips-Yoo approach is not better than the Leiter Scholarly Impact Score method, but rather is different.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Phillips & Yoo: A Better Faculty Citation Rankings System (Sept. 7, 2012)
• More on the Phillips & Yoo 'Better Faculty Citation Rankings System' (Sept 8, 2012)

Update:  Brian Leiter (Chicago), Phillips & Yoo Citation Study Has Some Serious Problems:

We had noted earlier the risk that Web of Science cites would not necessarily pick up citations that reflect impact on legal scholarship. ... If they really didn't correct for false positives, that is also a rather serious error.  Hopefully they will correct for these and other mistakes before long.  I still think there are virtues to this approach, but it does not need to be carried out correctly!