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 February 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.)	29,293	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	6269
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	21,740	Adam Chodorow (Ariz. St.)	4415
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	20,170	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	4304
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	17,673	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3328
5	James Hines (Michigan)	17,296	Gregg Polsky (N. Carolina)	3046
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	16,616	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2782
7	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	16,503	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	2653
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	16,162	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2573
9	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	14,285	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2530
10	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	12,722	Jen Kowal (USC)	2450
11	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	12,588	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	2296
12	David Weisbach (Chicago)	12,555	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	2155
13	David Walker (Boston U.)	12,553	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	2147
14	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	12,268	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2069
15	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	11,994	James Hines (Michigan)	2017
16	Herwig Schlunck (Vand.)	11,643	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1915
17	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	11,309	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1902
18	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	11,101	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	1821
18	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	10,988	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1668
20	Ed McCaffery (USC)	10,786	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1618
21	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	10,767	Heather Field (UC-Hastings)	1549
22	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	10,412	Allison Christians (McGill)	1461
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	10,059	Dick Harvey (Villanova)	1434
24	Steve Bank (UCLA)	9727	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1368
25	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	9266	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	1332

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