Exploring Citation Count Methods of Measuring Faculty Scholarly Impact

Margaret Kiel-Morse\u27s contribution to this volume is Exploring Citation Count Methods of Measuring Faculty Scholarly Impact. After US News & World Report\u27s announcement in 2019 that they will provide a separate ranking of law schools based on faculty scholarly impact, scrutinizing the various methods of assessing scholarly impact has been a hot topic. The various methods include reputation surveys, citation counts, and publication counts. This paper focuses on citation counts. Several methods of conducting citation counts have been circulated since the 1990s, notably Brian Leiter \u27s studies using Westlaw \u27s Law Reviews and Journals database; the Leiter study updates conducted by Gregory Sisk, et al., in 2012, 2015, and 2018; Heald and Sichelman \u27s look at HeinOnline and SSRN in Ranking the Academic Impact of 100 American Law Schools; and Ruhl, Vandenbergh, and Dunaway\u27s 2019 study using Web of Science in Total Scholarly Impact: Law Professor Citations in Non-Law Journals for interdisciplinary scholarly impact. Following the Ruhl study, faculty at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, with its strong record of interdisciplinary scholarship, were curious to learn Maurer \u27s overall scholarly impact. I reviewed existing studies of law faculty scholarly impact and then conducted a study of the interdisciplinary work of the Maurer Law faculty by duplicating the Ruhl citation count method of examining law faculty publications in non-law journals. The results illustrated that Maurer faculty are making a significant scholarly impact in interdisciplinary publications and that a true overall scholarly impact score for a law school\u27s faculty must include some measure of interdisciplinary work This article reviews a sample of the literature on measuring scholarly impact, describes the citation count method and related issues explored at Maurer, and discusses the benefits and limitations of including interdisciplinary scholarship in evaluating law faculty scholarly impact.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1304/thumbnail.jp