Paul L. Caron
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Monday, April 5, 2010

The 15 Most-Cited Tax Faculty

Brian Leiter (Chicago) has released a ranking of the Highest Impact Faculty in 13 Areas of Specialization, including tax, as measured by citations during the past five years (Jan. 1, 2005 - Jan. 15, 2010):

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:

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

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Comments

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

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