Paul L. Caron
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Thursday, October 24, 2019

SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

SSRN Logo (2018)SSRN has updated its monthly ranking 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.  This ranking includes downloads from two 30- and 35-page papers by 12 tax professors on the new tax legislation that garnered a lot of media attention (including the New York Times and Washington Post) and generated a massive amount of downloads (the papers are the most downloaded tax papers of all-time by over 200%).  See Brian Leiter (Chicago), 11 Tax Profs Blow Up The SSRN Download Rankings. (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)).  Here is the new list (through October 1, 2019) 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   Recent
1 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)  186,021 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) 10,050
2 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 119,255 Daniel Hemel (Chicago) 7,297
3 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) 115,157 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 6,811
4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 114,011 David Kamin (NYU) 6,793
5 Daniel Hemel (Chicago) 113,766 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) 5,877
6 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 108,823 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 5,867
7 Cliff Fleming (BYU) 103,845 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)  5,500
8 David Kamin (NYU) 102,620 Ari Glogower (Ohio State) 5,285
9 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) 100,975 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) 5,113
10 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) 100,034 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham)  4,915
11 Ari Glogower (Ohio State) 98,656 Cliff Fleming (BYU) 4,835
12 Michael Simkovic (USC) 43,490 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 2,809
13 D. Dharmapala (Chicago) 37,563 Richard Ainsworth (BU) 2,549
14 Paul Caron (Pepperdine) 35,946 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 2,442
15 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 35,946 Michael Simkovic (USC) 2,403
16 Richard Ainsworth (BU) 28,331 D. Dharmapala (Chicago) 2,260
17 Ed Kleinbard (USC) 26,096 Kyle Rozema (Chicago) 2,147
18 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 25,709 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 2,098
19 Jim Hines (Michigan) 24,674 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 2,028
20 Gladriel Shobe (BYU) 24,076 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 1,906
21 Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) 23,733 Hugh Ault (Boston College) 1,866
22 Richard Kaplan (Illinois) 23,494 Yariv Brauner (Florida) 1,680
23 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 23,327 Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indy) 1,354
24 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 23,069 George Yin (Virginia) 1,296
25 Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) 22,556 Paul Caron (Pepperdine)   1,192

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: 

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:

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

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/10/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html

Scholarship, Tax, Tax Prof Rankings, Tax Rankings, Tax Scholarship | Permalink

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