Just for the fun of it, I've made a webpage that dispenses advice on
what U.S. legal periodicals should be purchased with any user-selected
budget. It's at http://law.wlu.edu/library/mostcited/selecting.asp
Aside from entering what you want to spend, you may specifically select
any of the listed periodicals for inclusion (you'd do that if you wished
to include to some lower cost-effective-ranked journals, perhaps because
of their jurisdictional or subject interest).
Once you submit the page it will return with a title listing of:
(a) the periodicals you actively selected (if any) and their total
price,
(b) periodicals, in cost-effective order, that are within your budget
(c) excluded periodicals, in cost-effective order, outside your budget
(d) other U.S. periodicals from the "most-cited" list that are excluded
because they have an unknown or a zero price
The lists don't include non-U.S. titles (except for a few that are
published elsewhere but have strong U.S. connections, e.g. the official
journal of a U.S. association that might be published in England or the
Netherlands).
Journal prices are those paid by U.S. academic libraries. The price
figures come from those paid by W&L Law Library, or as shown on the
journal's webpage, or as given in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. If
anyone wants to correct a price I'd be happy to receive corrections.
John Doyle
Washington & Lee Law School
A journal cost-effectiveness site created by Ted Bergstrom (Dept. of Economics, UC Santa Barbara) and Preston McAfee (Cal. Tech.) offers ranked lists of journals based on average price per citation, and average price per article. The ranking of law journals can be seen by clicking on
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mcafee/Journal/search/search.cgi?Law=on&sort=ppcsort
The citation and article counts come from the ISI database, and the price information from Ulrich's International Periodical Directory database.
The website lists 91 journals in the category of "law" and its top-10 law reviews by price per citation are as follows:
Stanford Law Review 18c
Cornell Law Review 19c
Columbia Law Review 21c
Fordham Law Review 21c
U. of Penn. Law Review 28c
Geo. Law Journal 29c
Virginia Law Review 30c
U. of Chicago Law Rev. 31c
NYU Law Review 37c
Vanderbilt Law Review 37c
The listing of 91 journals is a little too limited in number to be very useful (particularly where it would be more useful, in differentiating lower ranked journals). I've been thinking for a while about adding price data to the "most-cited legal periodicals listing". I'm inclined to do it, though the work involved in reliably obtaining (and maintaining) the subscription price data would be an effort.
I did a sampling of some of the higher impact-factor ranked law reviews back in November 2005 at http://bloggery.wlu.edu/lawrevs/archives/000620.html (as I didn't check every law review this wasn't a list of top cost-effectiveness, just a list of comparative cost-effectiveness for the highest impact-factor ranked law reviews). The results of that sample were (given as the average number of cites per dollar cost):
Stanford Law Review 13.81
Yale Law Journal 12.64
Columbia Law Review 11.44
Fordham Law Review 10.75
Georgetown Law Journal 9.62
U. of Chicago Law Review 9.62
Michigan Law Review 9.64
N.Y.U. Law Review 9.34
Harvard Law Review 9.18
Virginia Law Review 8.6