SSRN Top Law Schools provides a number of measures of the scholarly impact of the authors currently affiliated with the law schools represented in the SSRN eLibrary. To generate the initial list, we used judgment when necessary to decide which institutions are "law schools". If you believe that your institution should be included in or excluded from this list, please let us know by writing to CommentsSuggestions@SSRN.com.

SSRN will be creating similar lists for other major areas of scholarship in addition to law, business and economics. Each institution will be included in only one of these area lists. For example, the same unit of an institution (say the Dept. of Law and Business at University of X) cannot be listed both as a law school and as a business school.

Please write to us at the above email address about any other issues, problems or suggestions you may have with these rankings.

Authors:

The list of authors affiliated with each Institution is based on the most recent information in SSRN's Professional Directory. You can correct your affiliation and other personal information through SSRN User Headquarters. If you see errors for other authors, please ask them to correct their personal information in the same manner. If you need to contact them, most authors have current email addresses accessible from their SSRN Author Page. You can get to their author page by clicking on their name in the SSRN system. If you see errors for others and cannot contact them, please click here to provide information to SSRN about the error and what you believe is the correct information. Changes will be reflected after the next monthly update.

Institutions:

You can audit the faculty affiliated with your institution in the SSRN database by clicking on the Authors link for your institution in the Top Law School table. That will take you to a page that displays all the authors in the SSRN database from your school. If you find authors there that are not on your faculty, please let us know by clicking here.

If you do not find authors that are currently on your faculty, it may be because the faculty member has no papers in the SSRN eLibrary or the faculty member is not affiliated with your school in the SSRN database. To check whether a missing faculty member has papers in the SSRN eLibrary, please go to the eLibrary search page and enter the first and last name of the faculty member in the author search section. If you find papers associated with the author, please ask the author to add your school as an affiliation through SSRN User Headquarters. Please let us know if the faculty member has any problems adding the affiliation. We require an author's permission to add an affiliation but are happy to help answer any questions. The papers for the faculty member will be included in your school's rankings after the next monthly update.

SSRN provides four different ways you can get the papers of your faculty posted to the eLibrary. The level of service provided by SSRN for each of these options varies. There is a no-cost option as well as fee-based options that provide higher levels of service designed to increase readership of your faculty's research. For information on these options, write or call Gregg Gordon at gregg_gordon@ssrn.com or 585-442-8170 in Rochester, NY.

Because the importance of scholarship cannot, of course, be captured by a single ranking, we provide rankings based on a number of measures. These rankings are meant to complement other measures of scholarly impact. We currently provide law school rankings for 11 different measures. Rankings are provided for each of the measures in the table, and you can re-order the table by clicking on any column heading.

These rankings can inform your thinking about the productivity and influence of schools and authors; but the underlying issues are too complicated to be summarized in any limited number of simple measures. SSRN's Rankings can provide data not previously available that is useful in addressing many issues. Use them carefully and wisely.

The rankings in order of presentation in the SSRN Top Law School tables are:

1. Total New Downloads
   
   Total downloads in the last 12 months of all papers by all authors currently affiliated with a specific institution. New Downloads provides a measure of the interest over the last 12 months in the research of an institution's faculty that appears on SSRN.



2. Number of New Papers
   
   New papers posted to SSRN in the last 12 months by authors currently affiliated with the institution. This measure includes all papers that were entered into the SSRN eLibrary within the last 12 months by affiliated authors.



3. New Downloads per Paper
   
   The average number of downloads per paper during the last 12 months for all authors currently affiliated with an institution. This measure covers all papers, including older papers.



4. Total Number of Downloads
   
   Total all-time downloads from SSRN of all papers by all authors currently affiliated with an institution.



5. Number of Papers
   
   The total number of full-text papers included in the SSRN eLibrary by authors currently affiliated with an institution. This measure does not include submissions for which only the abstract, but not the full-text of the paper, is included in the SSRN eLibrary. In some cases, the SSRN eLibrary includes more than one version of the same paper. SSRN treats multiple versions of a paper as a member of a version group. See note on treatment of multiple-author papers below.



6. Total Downloads per Paper
   
   The average number of all-time downloads per paper for all papers by authors currently affiliated with an institution. This measure is not adjusted for the length of time that a particular paper has been included in the SSRN eLibrary.



7. Number of Authors
   
   The number of authors currently affiliated with an institution that have at least one downloadable paper in the SSRN eLibrary.



8. Total Downloads per Author
   
   Total all-time downloads of all papers by all authors with papers included in the SSRN eLibrary currently affiliated with an institution, divided by the number of such authors. This measure adjusts for the different sizes of institutions. SSRN does not provide rankings for law schools with less than 5 authors in the SSRN database.



9. New Downloads per Author
   
   Total downloads in the last 12 months of all papers by authors currently affiliated with an institution, divided by the number of such authors with papers included in the SSRN eLibrary. This provides a measure of the current interest (in the last 12 months) in all of the faculty's work on SSRN, adjusted for the different sizes of institutions. SSRN does not provide rankings for law schools with less than 5 authors in the SSRN database.



10. Citations
    
    Total citations by papers in the SSRN eLibrary to the papers on SSRN of a law school faculty.



11. Eigenfactor™ Score
    
    This Eigenfactor™ Score measures the importance of a paper adjusting for various factors including the number of authors of the cited paper, the number of authors of the citing paper(s), the number of references in the citing paper(s), and the importance of the citing paper(s) as measured by their Eigenfactor™ Score.
    
    NOTE ON TREATMENT OF MULTIPLE-AUTHOR PAPERS:
    SSRN's ranking statistics are calculated from data on all papers associated with an institution. The papers associated with an institution are defined as those unique papers authored by one or more members of the institution. This means that an institution is credited for the downloads or citations to a paper once, even if the paper was co-authored by two or more members of the institution's faculty. Thus, co-authorship itself does not influence an institution's score on the measures that are not deflated by the number of authors.