Making an Impact as a Law Journal Editor (Spring 2008)
posted by Dave Hoffman
(I’m reprising an edited and updated version of my April 2006 post on how incoming board members at law journals can make an immediate impact on their organization. The original post had a good comment thread, which hopefully we can reprise here.)
How can student editors efficiently improve their journal’s reputation? The problem is a hard one. Al Brophy has shown that standard measures of journal rank (see here and click on 2007 Rank, JNLS tab) correlate with overall school US News ranking, itself a sticky number. However, the Washington and Lee ranking methodology offers other options, including the increasingly popular IMPACT and IMMEDIACY variables. In this entry, I’m going to explore some ways that journal editors might be able to increase their scores on these factors, and (in a virtuous cycle) the number and quality of submissions. In no way should this post be seen as an endorsement of the current system, though I’m significantly more pro-student-edited-journals than many of my colleagues. This is more of a user’s guide to the devil we’ve got.
1. Convince High-Profile Authors to Write Articles: High-profile authors are, by definition, cited more often. See Balkin & Levinson, How to Win Cites and Influence People. It is also conceivable that HP folks produce better work than LP folks (to know for sure, we’d have to have an agreement about what better work is. And, as Frank Pasquale has pointed out, we don’t). But, for believers in the HP strategy, there are a few variants:
- Symposium Issues
- Invite authors to submit book reviews or essays on substantive topics
- Invite tributes to famous judges
Of these methods, the best is the second. Symposiums may not always get authors’ full attention, in part because of collective action/collective benefit problems. Tributes, I think, are unlikely to be cited heavily, if at all. But even the second method has problems, as discussed below.
2. Turn Straw Into Gold: This is an editing strategy. As Barack Obama noted when he took the reins at the HLR, making articles easier to read might make them more likely to be read. How? First, as many have noted, editors should back away from footnote-fetishization. Footnote-laden sentences are hard to read and easy to ignore.[*] Second, editors should push authors to select titles that clearly explain the article’s purposes, and should help authors to write succinct abstracts for every piece. (Notably, I think there is a trend toward succinct law review titles too, with Brian Tamanaha now taking the cake. If anyone cares, I’m flag-planting on the titles “Contracts,” “The Corporation,” “Fantastic Law,” and “Behavior.”)
3. Promotion: Some journals have begun to push authors to put up articles onto SSRN. There is no reason for the journals’ marketing to stop there. Journals should absorb more of the cost of reprints for authors who either are not affiliated with a law school, or whose law school does not pay for reprints. Journals also should aggressively promote (via email or fliers) journal contents to practitioners and judges, who may be unlikely to be reached by academic reprint mailings. Partnership with blogs is also a good method – PENNumbra, for example, has gotten some nice attention for its work through its postings here.
4. Gaming the System?: Reading W&L’s ranking methodology page, some obvious strategies are currently available. Impact factor is currently dependent on citations per article, and is “biased against journals that publish a larger number of shorter articles, such as book reviews.” Thus, Strategy 1(b) above is in tension with increasing impact scores in the short run. It is better (at least for IMPACT purposes) to have one article cited 20 times than two articles cited 15 times apiece. IMPACT rankings can be increased if a journal publishes a long article that is cited by multiple sources – the model I have in mind is Georgetown’s annual criminal law summary, or a state counterpart. Because courts cite such summaries more often than they do “theory” articles, the IMMEDIACY factor would also likely be affected. As the W&L methodology makes clear, neither factor is particularly robust – they can be moved with one or two strong articles (i.e., they do not appear to control for outliers).
Thus, a strategy might be to recruit students to collaborate to write longer, doctrinal, judge and practitioner friendly, pieces. Journals often do this on an annual basis, but why not have summaries of various areas of law in every issue? Or to be more provocative, journals might consider replacing the case note and comment system entirely with a system of mini-treatises. Such a change would have the secondary effect of making law reviews more relevant to law practice. And a tertiary effect of rescuing rankings from charges that they are always pernicious.
The comment thread is open for other ideas.
Notes:
February 23, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Posted in: Law School (Law Reviews)
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Responses (4)
Paul Gowder - February 23, 2008 at 6:41 pm
How about actual things that lead to quality in other disciplines, like instituting blind review and begging or bribing faculty members to read pieces?
shg - February 24, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Thanks for the link Dave. I wonder if the editors realize that this means people, other than a handful of lawprofs and the author’s wife, will read the articles and recognize their law reviews as being relevant. I don’t know if law students realize how insular their world can be, and that after 3 years, the universe explodes and suddenly law school disappears into the mist.
anon - February 25, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Might I suggest that the citations rankings aren’t the gold standard to which Law Reviews should hold themselves. First, assuming highest number of citations is the goal (a poor assumption at best) how could anyone predict with any certainty the number of citations articles will receive in the future? Second, the W&L rankings are rather flawed – from one year to the next they changed the weight of the “impact factor” from 57% to 34%. Seems like a drastic (and rather odd) change to make overnight.
The best thing Editors can do is make sure their volumes are well-edited and published in a timely fashion.
articles editor - February 25, 2008 at 6:15 pm
The problem with the W&L impact factor is it takes an average of citations over articles, which it defines as pieces over 5 pages. Law reviews publish student work (i.e. notes/comments) in addition to articles. Student work is not cited as much as articles are, and student work is over 5 pages. Thus W&L’s impact factor publishes journals with productive staffs.
The other measure W&L uses is total number of citations. Obviously, the more articles a journal publishes, the more citations there will be. This punishes journals with small staffs that accept & edit fewer articles.
W&L produces biased rankings ensured to advantage law reviews with large unproductive staffs.
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