{"id":102,"date":"2009-08-28T18:14:18","date_gmt":"2009-08-29T00:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/?p=102"},"modified":"2009-08-28T18:18:15","modified_gmt":"2009-08-29T00:18:15","slug":"journal-reputation-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/28\/journal-reputation-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Journal Reputation and Moving Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/24\/the-signaling-value-of-law-reviews\/\" target=\"_blank\">Signaling Value of Law Reviews,<\/a>\u00a0I noted an article by Al Brophy (North Carolina) cautioning that scholarship should be judged on its own merits.\u00a0 Paul Caron <a href=\"http:\/\/taxprof.typepad.com\/taxprof_blog\/2009\/08\/papers-in-.html\" target=\"_blank\">notes<\/a>\u00a0an empirical study of &#8220;the theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect),&#8221; that controls for article quality.\u00a0 In <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/ftp\/arxiv\/papers\/0908\/0908.3177.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">The Impact Factor\u2019s Matthew Effect:\u00a0 A Natural Experiment in Bibliometrics<\/a>, Vincent Larivi\u00e8re &amp; Yves Gingras conclude<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, it&#8217;s not just a matter of the quality of the paper, but also of its placement.\u00a0 It follows that an author&#8217;s academic reputation is also enhanced by placement.\u00a0 Thus, the urge to &#8220;trade-up&#8221; in placement of articles.\u00a0 Presumably, a law school&#8217;s peer reputation follows (with a lag?) that of its faculty.\u00a0 Earlier, I <a href=\"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/21\/ambition-and-rankings\/\" target=\"_blank\">discussed<\/a>\u00a0Jeff Lipshaw&#8217;s (Suffolk) thoughts on the penchant of ambitious young professors\u00a0to <a href=\"http:\/\/lawprofessors.typepad.com\/legal_profession\/2009\/08\/ambition-and-rankings-we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;move up the food chain<\/a>\u00a0to a law school with a higher ranking.<\/p>\n<p>Given the strong influence of <a href=\"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2009\/08\/20\/components-of-the-2010-us-news-rankings-of-the-top-100-law-schools\/\" target=\"_blank\">peer reputation in the <em>US News<\/em> law-school rankings<\/a>, should lower-tier law-schools try to move up in the rankings\u00a0by using\u00a0pay-for-placement bonuses to young professors that might be just moving through?\u00a0 Or does their ability to do that&#8211;or their earlier association with a school&#8211;also enhance the peer reputation of that school?<\/p>\n<p>Gary Rosin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Signaling Value of Law Reviews,\u00a0I noted an article by Al Brophy (North Carolina) cautioning that scholarship should be judged on its own merits.\u00a0 Paul Caron notes\u00a0an empirical study of &#8220;the theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect),&#8221; that controls for article quality.\u00a0 In The Impact Factor\u2019s Matthew Effect:\u00a0 A Natural Experiment in Bibliometrics, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,15,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-professors","category-law-schools","category-rankings","category-scholarship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}