The Volokh Conspiracy - Scholarly Impact of the VC's Untenured "Faculty":

[Ilya Somin, February 20, 2009 at 7:31pm] Trackbacks

Scholarly Impact of the VC's Untenured "Faculty":

Just for fun, I measured the scholarly impact of the VC untenured "faculty" (David Kopel, Sasha Volokh, and myself) using Brian Leiter's recent scale discussed in David Bernstein's post. With a "scholarly impact" of approximately 183 (mean 168, median 198), we would rank tenth on Leiter's scale (which of course only considers tenured professors), just ahead of the tenured faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and UC Irvine (170), and just behind Michigan (185). Our median citation count would rank seventh, just behind Columbia; our mean falls just outside the top ten.

I don't claim any great scientific validity for this "study." Comparing a group of three lawbloggers to the average score for the top ten tenured faculty at various law schools isn't really good methodology. But it's a mildly interesting result nonetheless.

Related Posts (on one page):

Scholarly Impact of the VC's Untenured "Faculty":
Rating the Scholarly Impact of the VC "Faculty":

Eli Rabett (www):

With the median so much lower than the mean, you have a Bill Gates in the room, as in when Bill Gates walks into the room the average income goes over a billion.

2.20.2009 8:01pm

Ilya Somin:

With the median so much lower than the mean, you have a Bill Gates in the room, as in when Bill Gates walks into the room the average income goes over a billion.

Actually, our median (198) is considerably higher than our mean (168), though I wouldn't make too much of this result, since there are only three of us.

2.20.2009 8:06pm

Curious George:

Thus, we have a room with Gates, Buffett and Joe the Plumber.

Who's the weakest link?

2.20.2009 8:44pm

guest890:

Eli might have been referring to the tenured faculty mentioned in the earlier post (for which comments are not enabled), which gives a mean of 530 but a median of 330. Both very impressive, but with a significant disparity.

That said, Leiter's data shows a similar disparity between the mean and median at many schools (e.g. 440/240 for U. Chicago). So it seems that having one or two superstars is fairly common.

2.20.2009 8:57pm

frankcross (mail):

Not to deprecate the conspirators, who are fine researchers. But isn't this a rather sad commentary on much of the academy?

2.20.2009 9:16pm

Hadur:

That said, Leiter's data shows a similar disparity between the mean and median at many schools (e.g. 440/240 for U. Chicago).

Who could POSSIBLY be responsible for that, I wonder?

2.20.2009 9:54pm

Bill Poser (mail) (www):

Not to deprecate the conspirators, who are fine researchers. But isn't this a rather sad commentary on much of the academy?

Law professors are probably spending too much time blogging. :)

2.20.2009 10:12pm

Steve Donohue (mail) (www):

I'm not sure what you're getting at, Hadur. Sunstein is gone and Judge Posner doesn't count (not a professor). I think it's just a combo of a lot of really established professors and a lot of really young ones.

2.21.2009 12:23am

Ilya Somin:

Thus, we have a room with Gates, Buffett and Joe the Plumber.

Who's the weakest link?

Joe the Plumber actually makes a pretty good income, if you believe the press accounts.

2.21.2009 1:54am

Downfall:

Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't factor in court citations at all. Given that courts actually decide legal issues, wouldn't that be a much better indication on what work was making an impact in the real world?

2.21.2009 10:12am

Eli Rabett (www):

guest had it right. It is interesting that the untenured show a much smaller gap between median and mean and a reversal of the direction. In that case, we can guess who will win the rat race. In the case of the tenured, it would be interesting to know if it were a case of systematic deadwood or that some of the tenured faculty were off doing other (useful??) things.

2.21.2009 12:34pm

Curt Fischer:

it would be interesting to know if it were a case of systematic deadwood or that some of the tenured faculty were off doing other (useful??) things.

Or if the citation half-life varied widely among of the various sub-fields of legal scholarship, or if the mean citation count for various subspecialties was very different.

Or about a thousand other things...

2.21.2009 6:39pm

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