Monday, April 5, 2010
The 15 Most-Cited Tax Faculty
Rank
Tax Prof
Citations
Age
1
Michael Graetz (Yale)
370
66
2
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)
310
53
3
David Weisbach (Chicago)
300
47
4
Edward McCaffery (USC)
280
52
5
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)
260
53
Edward Zelinsky (Cardozo)
260
60
7
Lawrence Zelenak (Duke)
240
55
8
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)
230
55
9
Victor Fleischer (Colorado)
200
39
10
Calvin Johnson (Texas)
180
66
Deborah Schenk (NYU)
180
63
12
David Schizer (Columbia)
170
42
13
Howard Abrams (Emory)
160
55
Anne Alstott (Harvard)
160
47
Thomas Griffith (USC)
160
61
Highly-cited scholars whose cites are not exclusively in this area:
- Louis Kaplow (Harvard) (age 54), 970 citations
- Mark Gergen (UC-Berkeley) (age 54), 210 citations
- Kyle Logue (Michigan) (age 45), 180 citations
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- More on Faculty Citation Rankings (Nov. 28, 2007)
- The Most-Cited Tax Faculty (Nov. 16, 2007)
- Ten Most-Cited Tax Faculty (Aug. 20, 2007)
In our article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83, 120-22 (2006), Bernie Black (Northwestern) and I examined the Top 25 tax faculty as measured by SSRN downloads, a practice I update monthly on TaxProf Blog.
Update: Leiter has announced that he is in the process of correcting errors. Note also that the ranking is per capita (a point explicitly made in his earlier ranking). A reader points out that several tax faculty with higher citation counts are not included in Leiter's ranking.https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2010/04/the-most.html
Comments
So far most claims that scholars with allegedly higher citation counts were omitted have turned out to be based on failure to follow the instructions for the searches correctly (usually the date parameters were wrong). After double-checking their results on possible errors, readers should send them to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Brian Leiter | Apr 5, 2010 1:46:18 PM
There is an interesting phenomenon here in that the weekly rankings frequently feature rather middling stuff but the long-term rankings seem more or less to reflect actual influence. Perhaps the key is not so much to ignore statistical evidence as to take a long-range rather than short-term view. I do think that citations, for all their faults, are a much better indicator than SSRN downloads: to cite something, you do have to read at least the first page.
Posted by: mike livingston | Apr 5, 2010 6:47:22 AM
IMO, citations are a far more reliable way of judging scholarship than SSRN downloads. I'd like to see a ranking of professors who have very high SSRN download rates, but relatively low citations. Perhaps something based on a formula, "citations rank minus SSRN download rank."
Posted by: anon | Apr 6, 2010 8:01:35 AM