August 8, 2007

Michigan Law Review's Book Review Issue

Does the annual Michigan Law Review's "Survey of Books Related to the Law" issue hurt the journal's ranking? And the answer is "yes", unless you take the view that the issue adds to the law review's luster by displaying its insouciance to the rankings. I looked at each of the 3805 citing articles counted in the 1999-2006 ranking at http://lawlib.wlu.edu/LJ and found that 611 of them cited to Michigan's book review issues (and did not also cite some other recent Michigan Law Review issue). Plugging the reduced citation count into the ranking database (and also reducing the number of published articles by the count of those in the book review issues) produced the following results:





RankCombined
Score		Impact
Factor		Total
Cites
Without1267.48.53194
With1660.56.43805

So had it not published any of its book review issues, Michigan Law Review would rank 12th and not 16th (on the combined total-cites/impact-factor score). Publishing the issue produces more citeable articles and thus total cites is increased, but the review's impact factor is reduced. This is not to suggest that the Michigan Law Review should eliminate its book review issue, but that it would help the review's ranking if it published fewer book reviews.

Posted by doyle at August 8, 2007 12:23 PM