Ranking Data Explained:
SSRN Top 3,000 Law Authors


SSRN compiles rankings of Authors in our system based on a number of relevant measures, such as downloads and citations. To be ranked, an author must have at least one publicly available scholarly full-text paper on SSRN, and only the data for those full-text papers are used in the rankings. Privately available papers are not considered in these rankings. We compile rankings of all authors in SSRN and of authors in selected disciplines. The date the ranking was compiled is shown under the title on the ranking page.

Definitions of Measures Used in the Author Ranking Table:
The importance of an author’s work cannot, of course, be captured by a single ranking. SSRN provides rankings based on a number of measures. These rankings are meant to complement other measures of an author’s scholarly impact, including the quality of the peer-reviewed journals in which the work is published. SSRN’s rankings can inform your thinking about the popularity and scholarly influence of an author’s work. They provide valuable data not previously available. However, these measures have important limitations. Use them carefully and wisely. We solicit your views on how to improve these rankings. Please email us at: CommentsSuggestions@SSRN.com.

General information about the columns:

  • The numbers displayed in each column that are not in parentheses represent the count of the measure named in the column label (for example downloads or citations). The numbers in parentheses represents the author’s rank on that measure. The number of authors ranked is given in the Ranking Table’s title.
  • If the column header is underlined, then the column is sortable by clicking on the underlined header. When you click on the header again, it will re-sort in the opposite direction.
  • If you click on an underlined author’s name, you will be taken to that author’s Author Page. Any data item in the table that is underlined (e.g. downloads, citations), will display a graph of trend data if you click on it. Per paper statistics are provided only for authors with more than 5 publicly available full-text papers. If an author has less than 5 papers, (*) is displayed in the per paper columns.

SSRN currently provides author rankings for the following measures:

  • Total New Downloads: Total SSRN downloads of all of an author’s publicly available scholarly full-text papers during the last 12 months. This provides a measure of the current interest in all of an author’s work, including older papers.
  • # of New Papers: The number of scholarly full-text papers that were posted to SSRN in the last 12 months by an author, including papers that were written some time ago. It does not include papers for which SSRN has only the abstract. The SSRN eLibrary includes more than one version of some papers. We expect to correct for this double counting of papers in a future update as we complete our implementation of version groups. Where version groups are implemented the groups are treated is a single paper and citations and downloads are aggregated for all versions of a paper.
  • New Downloads Per Paper: This provides a measure of the average number of downloads per scholarly full-text paper during the last 12 months. This measure covers all of an author’s papers, including older papers. This measure is not adjusted for the length of time that a particular paper has been included in the SSRN eLibrary.
  • Total # of Downloads: Total lifetime SSRN downloads for all of an author’s publicly available scholarly full text papers.
  • Total # of Citations: The total number of times that an author’s paper has been cited by other papers in SSRN’s eLibrary. Citations are only counted for an author’s publicly available scholarly full-text papers.
  • # of Papers: The total number of publicly available scholarly full-text papers by an author included in the SSRN eLibrary. It does not include papers for which SSRN has only the abstract. In some cases, the SSRN eLibrary includes more than one version of the same paper. We expect to correct for this double counting of papers as we implement our version group solution throughout the SSRN site.
  • Total Downloads Per Paper: The average number of lifetime downloads per paper for all of an author’s publicly available scholarly papers. This measure is not adjusted for the length of time that a particular paper has been included in the SSRN eLibrary.
  • Total Citations Per Paper: The total number of times that an author’s papers have been cited by other papers in SSRN’s eLibrary divided by the total number of publicly available scholarly full text papers for this author.
  • Author-Level Eigenfactor® Score (x100): The author-level Eigenfactor® score is a weighted measure of an author’s citations. It adjusts for the number of authors of the paper, the number of outgoing citations from each paper citing an author’s paper and for the importance of the citing paper. All self citations are eliminated in calculating an author’s Eigenfactor® score. The score reported in the SSRN ranking tables is calculated from SSRN citation data only. To understand how this importance-weighting works, consider the following iterated voting procedure:
    "Each author begins with a single vote and passes it on, dividing the vote proportionally based on those authors whom she cites. In other words, if she cites two authors -- author A one time and author B two times -- she would distribute 1/3 of her vote to author A and 2/3 of her vote to author B. After one round of this procedure, some authors will receive more votes than others. In the second round, each author passes on her current vote total, as received in the previous round, again dividing this quantity equally among those authors whom she cites. This process is iterated indefinitely. Eventually, we reach a steady state in which each author receives an unchanging number of votes in each round. An author’s Eigenfactor® score is the percentage of the total votes that she receives at this steady state." (p. 3) See West, Jevin D., Jensen, Michael C., Dandrea, Ralph J., Gordon, Gregory J. and Bergstrom, Carl T., Author-Level Eigenfactor Metrics: Evaluating the Influence of Authors, Institutions and Countries Within the SSRN Community (February 14, 2011). Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 12-068 (Data as of March 14, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1636719.

Information on the Ranking lists for Each Scholarly Area:
SSRN generates author rankings in selected scholarly areas as well as for all SSRN authors as a whole (e.g. Law, Business, Economics, Accounting, Political Science, etc.), and we will expand this list over time. Each author appears in the overall SSRN ranking as well as being assigned to a single top-level area of scholarship using the best information we have about an author’s affiliation (e.g. an author with a Law school affiliation will be treated as a Law author, an author with a Business school affiliation will be treated as a Business Author, etc.). We use judgment when necessary to decide which institutions qualify as which specialty area. If you believe that you should not be included on the list to which we have initially assigned you, please let us know by emailing us at: CommentsSuggestions@SSRN.com. Please indicate your institutional affiliation, which scholarly area you should be ranked in, and please include your SSRN author id number. SSRN will be creating sub-specialty areas below the top-level scholarly areas (like entrepreneurship) and since these areas have few or no schools associated with them these authors will be allowed to appear in one or more of these depending on their expertise as represented by their papers on SSRN.

If you are a new author to SSRN, it will take a cycle of the rankings before you are included (i.e. if it is a monthly ranking, it could take up to a month for you to be included). You currently must be associated with a traditional school (e.g. of law, business, economics), in order to be included in the Rankings for each scholarly area, even if you have written papers on those topics. Please write us with requests to be included in a particular scholarly area if you are not associated with a traditional school at: CommentsSuggestions@SSRN.com.

Suggestions on How to Improve Your Ranking:
If you are interested in improving your ranking, we recommend the following:

  • If you have abstracts on SSRN with no PDF attached, upload the PDFs if you hold the copyright
  • Submit more of your recent papers to SSRN
  • Post your old papers on SSRN (Most papers published prior to the mid 1990’s can be put on SSRN because very few, if any, copyright assignment agreement(s) prior to that time included electronic rights. Therefore, you as author own them. You can submit papers of any age to SSRN.)
  • Include the URL for your SSRN Author Home Page at the bottom of your email signature. (Here is one way to do it:

 Electronic copies of my papers are available from the SSRN eLibrary at: 
http://ssrn.com/author=XXX 
(where you put your SSRN author ID number in place of XXX. Your author ID number is the digits at the end of the URL on your SSRN author page.)
  • Keep only one copy of each paper on the web and post it on SSRN. Then link to that copy from your personal or institutional web page(s) where your individual papers are so that the user goes to the SSRN abstract page to download them. The short form URL for any of your papers on SSRN is as follows:

 http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=YYY 
(where you put the SSRN Abstract ID number in place of YYY.) An added benefit of keeping your master copies of all your papers on SSRN is that you do not have to change anything if you should change your institutional affiliation.

Caution: Do not try to game the system.
SSRN has software in place to detect and prevent gaming and we do not look kindly on those who attempt to manipulate the system. SSRN has taken downloads away from those found engaging in manipulation and authors can be banned from SSRN for attempting to game the system.