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Law school blog citations to effect law school rankings?

December 27, 2005

Sabrina Pacifica posts there’s a recent paper by Alfred L. Brophy in the University of Alabama Law Review on ‘The Relationship between Law Review Citations and Law School Rankings.’ The paper tracks how citations of law schools’ law reviews by journals and courts effect law schools’ rankings.

Reminded me that Google’s PageRank system of the ranking of web pages is based on the value of incoming links from other sites, with links from sites with a higher PageRank counting more. In turn Google’s PageRank system was modeled after academic papers which are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation.

The day is going to come when the vast majority of law school professors and law students will have personal publishing platforms, or blogs. It’s not far fetched that incoming links to those blogs in the form of citations by other highly respected blogs, journals and the courts will effect law schools’ ranking. Google is certainly set up to do the job with its expanded indexing of scholarly papers.

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