SSRN postings and faculty productivity

Brian Leiter has some SSRN download numbers that attempt to deal with “one-hit-wonders” who have one paper that’s downloaded a lot. Leiter looks at faculty who have high downloads/paper and who have a minimum number of papers on SSRN. 

I was particularly interested in Leiter's list of the “top 20 law schools that have posted at least 100 papers, ranked according to downloads per paper.”  This provides a decent measure of productivity of whole faculties:  Look at total papers, focusing on the schools with papers that have achieved some measure of recognition through SSRN downloads. 

Although this looks only at papers uploaded to SSRN rather than total papers, there’s an advantage to this (other than hugely easing the data gathering problem):  it measures, to some extent, faculty engagement with the scholarly community.  In any event, it seems likely that, at least for the most productive schools, there would probably not be much difference in ranking if the productivity measure were total papers.  And over time, I suspect that SSRN downloading will become so common that SSRN really will be a measure of total papers, particularly if rankings like Leiter’s become widely recognized.

A problem with Leiter’s numbers is that schools with large faculties get an advantage.  So I’ve come up with a pure productivity measure of papers/faculty.  My assistant compiled this from the AALS Faculty Directory.

The question, of course, is who should count as faculty. I did it the easy way – count everybody but pure administrators, including all teaching and clinical faculty.  My theory was that you’d want to include anybody who might be contributing to SSRN, and leave it to the schools as to whom to list in the “faculty” directory.  A side effect of this statistic is that schools would have an incentive to reduce the reported size of their faculty to offset the incentive to increase it in order to bump the student/faculty ratio.  But I confess to being uneasy about this and would appreciate guidance as to a better number.

So here’s the numbers of papers/faculty, based on Leiter’s top 20.  Comments?

                                           Faculty    Papers    Ratio

                                                                                                                                                               

chicago	48	296	6.16
gmu	51	208	4.07
vanderbilt	55	218	3.96
harvard	125	460	3.68
stanford	79	260	3.29
usc	61	175	2.86
illinois	65	181	2.78
ucla	104	267	2.56
usd	60	137	2.38
columbia	115	233	2.02
cal	100	200	2
uva	92	180	1.95
yale	107	188	1.75
nyu	120	186	1.72
mich	90	154	1.71
bu	77	131	1.7
duke	69	116	1.68
texas	94	147	1.5
georgetown	138	207	1.5
gwu	111	151	1.36

Update: Here's a table revised to reflect faculty size data Bernie Black was kind enough to provide derived from Leiter, supplemented by Lindgren/Seltzer ("LLS"), which Bernie describes as "pretty good."  The rankings change, but not by much.

                                                                                                                                                                       

school	papers	LLS fac	LLS ratio
1. chi	296	35	8.46
2. stan	260	40	6.5
3. harv	460	80	5.75
4. vand	218	39	5.59
5. gmu	208	40	5.2
6. ill	181	35	5.17
7. ucla	267	62	4.31
8. usc	175	43	4.07
9. colum	233	61	3.82
10. cal	200	54	3.7
11. yale	188	53	3.55
12. uva	180	60	3
13. mi	154	52	2.96
14. usd	137	47	2.91
15. duke	116	47	2.47
16. bu	131	54	2.42
17.g’town	207	87	2.38
18. gwu	151	66	2.29
19. nyu	186	82	2.27
20. texas	147	73	2.01

Comments

[BL]

Isn't the real issue how many faculty from each school are actually posting their papers on SSRN? Most of my colleagues engaged in the scholarly community (e.g., Laycock, Levinson, Powe, Sager etc.) almost never put anything on SSRN. Maybe this is factored in to what you've posted, it is a little hard to read the data the way it appears on my browser.

[Larry Ribstein]

Brian: Apologies for the formatting -- I'm having trouble with tables in Typepad.

As for your substantive point: no, I don't have a number for percentage posting on SSRN. I relied on your numbers for total postings, and then got two measures of total faculty. Schools might vary significantly, but I suspect that on most faculties a high percentage post something on SSRN. If I'm right, then to get at your point I would have to look at variance in percentage SSRN postings/total papers, which is a huge project.

Apart from the difficulty of the task, for the reason stated in my post, I believe the variance is relevant to faculty quality because it proxies roughly for scholarly engagement. SSRN has been around for 10 years now, and it takes papers in all fields, not just finance/corporate. There is currently no better way to circulate papers for comment among colleagues in the profession.

That being said, I agree that the data might miss something on quality until everybody posts everything on SSRN and only SSRN (e.g., as to the latter, I have a significant number of downloads on BePress). Though short of perfection, I think the above numbers do tell us something about relative faculty quality in terms of productivity.

[BL]

Thanks for the reply. I guess I'm skeptical that it is true that
"the above numbers do tell us something about relative faculty quality in terms of productivity." A casual survey suggests that some schools have relatively high percentages of faculty who post on SSRN, while others have hardly any--so this just duplicates a bias in favor of size (the more of your folks who post on SSRN, the higher you score). That there should be these differences in percentages who post is not surprising, given the familiar field bias in terms of who uses SSRN: namely, folks in corporate, law and economics, and intellectual property use SSRN far more than any other group of scholars.