Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Most cited law profs

from the Madisonian in March 2009:

1.) Posner, Richard A. cited 12,586 times in 251 articles.
2.) Sunstein, Cass R. cited 11,521 times in 267 articles.
3.) Epstein, Richard A. cited 6,194 times in 272 articles.
4.) Easterbrook, Frank H. cited 6,018 times in 84 articles

All of whom were at the University of Chicago when LBE was there.

Nevertheless, one notes the absolute number of citations is small compared to the leading citation numbers for
scientists!

**UPDATE.

About 13 years ago, in the Dec. 96 issue of Intellectual Property Today, LBE discussed citations and noted the following:

BN referred to a 1986 article by Eugene Garfield, "Do Nobel Prize Winners Write Citation Classics?" For refer-ence, I include herewith the total (first author) citation count for the three Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry in 1996, who won for their work on buckminsterfullerene (C60; "buckyball"): R.E. Smalley (1715), H. W. Kroto (3754), and R. F. Curl (1464). For comparison, I give numbers for past chemistry laureates: L. Pauling (23,187), P. J. Flory (19,173), G. A. Olah (11,795) and H. Taube (1785) and other chemistry professors J. P. Collman (9376), J. I. Brauman (1009), and N. H. Nachtrieb (351) n9.

n9 These prestigious authors presumably publish in primarily prestigious journals. Garfield has noted that only 100 journals (out of 3,400 indexed journals in SCI) account for 44% of cited articles.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Oliver E. Williamson, who won this year's Nobel Prize in Economics, shared an appointment at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall and so can also be considered a "law professor." While he did not benefit from the built-in advantage of the two judges on your list, he was oft cited: A quick search on Lexis in the "journals and law reviews" (jlr) tab shows 1,976 law review articles that either cited to him or to his primary contribution, "transaction cost economics." Of course this method seriously undercounts the number of law citations, since many of these articles cited to Williamson's work multiple times, and many other law-relevant journals are not included in "jlr" and even the ones included are not covered for all years. Still, even this impressive number is dwarfed by the number of economics, management, sociology, psychology, history, political science, and other social science journal articles that have cited to him and his scholarly contributions. And Williamson was not a Chicagoan: See for instance Williamson's retort to Posner in "Correspondence" The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1994), pp. 201-209.

1:21 PM  

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