It is, however, no fun at all to kick against the goads. 
 
Or, put another way, what you say does not come as news at all to anyone in the discipline; it is just that it is a paradigm not shared by our business school colleagues. The solution to the nonsense must be approached school by school. If you are in a school that takes your word for how to evaluate legal research, then count your blessings. 
 
Ginny

________________________________

From: Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk on behalf of Mitchell H. Rubinstein
Sent: Sat 10/10/2009 5:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Regional ALSB Journals


Mike:
Thanks for your comments, but seems to me that some who are members of this academy are trying to put a square peg in a round hole. There is just no objective way to have a large scale ranking of law journals. Articles need to be read and at most law schools articles are sent to independent reviewers to judge quality. Cite counts are too subjective as the popular issue of the day gets cited more or an article full of stats may be cited for those stats, but has actually contributed nothing. Same goes for SSRN. As for being listed in Cambell's, based upon my limited knowledge, it does not seem very relevant to a scholarly legal article. 
Listing on LEXIS and WESTLAW also means nothing as they will list just about anyone. Significantly, however, legal research is conducted that way and that's how articles will be cited and picked up by others.That is what should be important.
Mitch 

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

________________________________

From: "Michael O'Hara" <[log in to unmask]> 
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:05:12 -0500
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Regional ALSB Journals


ALSBTALK:

        Every institution has its own goals and its own mechanisms for evaluating quality.  Obviously, every author routinely serves that author's own interests (e.g., expand personal knowledge, get tenure, etc.) first before seeking to serve the interests of the profession. 

        Mitchell, when you write "the goal of writing a law review article" you focus on the correct variable for explaining the ALSBTALK focus on double blind review, focus on tiers of journals, focus on Cabell's.   http://www.cabells.com/directories.aspx <http://www.cabells.com/directories.aspx>  

        Many, but far from all, on ALSBTALK are affiliated with a college of business administration; and in turn many, but far from all, of those colleges are in turn are accredited by AACSB.    www.aacsb.edu    Accordingly, many of those contributing to this ALSBTALK topic are seeking to serve goals as authors that align with the goals of CBAs and with the goals of AACSB rather than align with law schools.  Nearly all on ALSBTALK are steeped in the traditions of law schools, and many might even prefer the traditions of law schools over the traditions of CBAs; but, the pull of employment considerations has been driving the discussion on ALSBTALK.  CBAs are dominated by disciplines other than law, as can be see from the list of Cabell's directories linked above.  Specific law journals appear in each of the field specific directories that is published by Cabell, but no Cabell's directory has more than a small fraction of the law journals that exist.  Accordingly, for many purposes within many CBAs those law journals do not "count" (e.g., management by objective goals require a certain number of events with certain attributes [e.g., double blind peer reviewed publication in a Tier One journal] or that event "counts" as something far less significant). 

        While you and all on ALSBTALK agree that Westlaw and Lexis are strong market indicators of a journal possessing a minimally acceptable reputation for legal scholarship, neither Westlaw nor Lexis figure into the quality evaluation process of the other fields within our CBAs. 

        You did identify an inidicia of quality that is utilized by some CBAs as well as by some law schools:  citation rate.  Within CBAs, however, there is a strong preference (borne of the Ph.D. programs originating such faculty) that a single, unified source of citation rate be utilized:  the Social Sciences Citation Index.     http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/social_sciences_citation_index <http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/social_sciences_citation_index>      That index, as all indexes do, has strengths and weaknesses depending upon the use to which its data are to be put.  Law is not captured well; whereas management, marketing, and economics are captured very well.  For example, how many law reviews can you think of whose name starts with the name "university"?  Is that number more than 50?  Here is the full list of those captured by SSCI.   http://science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=BC&Alpha=U <http://science.thomsonreuters.com/cgi-bin/jrnlst/jlresults.cgi?PC=BC&Alpha=U>     Cynics might see that differential capture rate as a strong motive of management faculty to insist upon the SSCIs use when those management faculty are in direct competition with law faculty for scarce college resources.  As you suspected, the directories published by Cabell only serve legal scholars embedded in non-primarily-legal institutions. 


Michael

Professor Michael J. O'Hara, J.D., Ph.D.
Finance, Banking, & Law Department
College of Business Administration
Roskens Hall 502 
University of Nebraska at Omaha 
Omaha  NE  68182 
[log in to unmask] 
(402) 554 - 2823 voice  fax (402) 554 - 2680
http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm <http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm>