SSRN Tax Professor Download Rankings

SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 750 American and international law school faculties and 3,000 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN database.  Here is the new list (through January 1, 2013) of the Top 25 U.S. Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and recent downloads (within the past 12 months):

 

		All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
1	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	28,675	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	5969
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	21,304	Adam Chodorow (Ariz. St.)	4299
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	20,047	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	4250
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	17,602	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3226
5	James Hines (Michigan)	17,167	Gregg Polsky (N. Carolina)	3005
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	16,416	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2843
7	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	16,326	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2541
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	15,972	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2538
9	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	14,063	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	2520
10	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	12,562	Ed kleinbard (USC)	2363
11	David Walker (Boston U.)	12,481	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	2292
12	David Weisbach (Chicago)	12,421	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	2185
13	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	12,326	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	2149
14	Chris Sannchirico (Penn)	12,157	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2146
15	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	11,883	James Hines (Michigan)	2017
16	Herwig Schlunck (Vand.)	11,588	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1942
17	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	11,077	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1910
18	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	10,947	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	1831
18	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	10,878	Dick Harvey (Villanova)	1753
20	Ed McCaffery (USC)	10,701	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1683
21	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	10,686	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1628
22	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	10,263	Heather Field (UC-Hastings)	1613
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	9919	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1424
24	Steve Bank (UCLA)	9564	Allison Christians (McGill)	1370
25	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	8863	Francine Lipman (UNLVl)	1364

Note that this ranking includes full-time tax professors with at least one tax paper on SSRN, and all papers (including non-tax papers) by these tax professors are included in the SSRN data.

The other SSRN ranking categories are: 

• All-Time Papers
• New Papers
• All-Time Downloads Per Paper
• New Downloads Per Paper

These rankings, of course, are imperfect measures of faculty scholarly performance -- as are the existing ranking methodologies of reputation surveys, productivity counts, and citation counts. Our modest claim in our article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006) (Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings), is that the SSRN data can play a role in faculty rankings along with these other measures.  Bill Henderson (Indiana) thinks we are too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.

For my other articles on what SSRN downloads can tell us about the current state and future of legal scholarship, and about the relationship between scholarship and blogging, see:

• The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 38 (2006)
• Are Scholars Better Bloggers? -- Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025 (2006)

For Ted Seto's faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 15 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas