Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Leiter: 11 Tax Profs Blow Up The SSRN Download Rankings
Brian Leiter (Chicago), SSRN Download Rankings Now Measure Mentions in Newspapers:
The top 11 "most downloaded" law authors in the last 12 months are eleven tax professors who co-authored two papers on the recent tax overhaul, which garnered a prominent mention in The New York Times, leading to more than 70,000 downloads in the last month. For 10 of these 11 tax professors, these two NYT-plugged papers constitute 95% or more of all their downloads. ... Farewell to SSRN downloads as a metric of any interest for at least a year!
For some reason, Mitchell Kane (NYU) — the twelfth academic co-author of the two papers — is not included in the SSRN download rankings (although the downloads are included on his individual author page).
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/01/11-tax-profs-blow-up-the-ssrn-download-rankings.html