Google Scholar Metrics has ranked law reviews, and just in time for the spring law review submissions season. In a previous post I discussed Google Scholar's ranking of the top 20 law reviews. In another post, I used the Google Scholar Metrics data to produce a list of Google's most-cited law review articles in top-20 journals for the last five years.

In this post, I expand the original rankings of the law reviews to include Google's ranking for many, many more publications. I have attempted to include as many law reviews as possible (specialty and general, as well as peer-reviewed) with h-indices over 10. Because journals below the top 20 are not available in a list from Google I searched for them individually, which means that I am sure that I have left some out. You can search Google Scholar Metrics to find the place for any other journals not listed and put them where they belong in your own ranking scheme.

The table below ranks each law review according to its h-index in Google Scholar. The final column gives the rank according to the W&L Combined 2005-2012 rank. The h-index is used as the primary rank (following Google's approach), with h5-median as a tiebreaker, and W&L ranking as a further tiebreaker. Note that Google's ranking is based on articles published from 2007 to 2011 and is calculated as of November 15, 2012.

The h-index used by Google to rank the journals is a valuable measure, but it has advantages and disadvantages, which are well summarized in the Wikipedia entry on the subject. One disadvantage in particular is that the index does not penalize journals for publishing many articles that are cited rarely or not at all. The Google data itself is also often inconsistent as to names and dates, so drawing inferences at a fine-grained level about individual authors or articles can be treacherous without further research.

The rankings largely parallel the widely known Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings, but with some incredible outliers. The Journal of Law & Economics is ranked as a top-20 journal by Google, but is ranked #382 (!) by Washington and Lee. I would render a verdict in favor of Google's ranking on that one. Overall, it seems that the W&L rankings tend to rank interdisciplinary journals lower (e.g., the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the Law & Society Review which are ranked 150 and 237, respectively, in the W&L rankings but in the top 50 journals according to Google). But Google seems to get some journals wrong as well, likely putting Yale too low and not even producing a ranking for well-known journals such as the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the Yale Journal on Regulation, or the Supreme Court Review.

Here are the rankings. Please feel free to comment with any corrections or major omissions. Note that the table cuts off at a Google h5-index of 10, which I used simply as a round number and not as a judgment about journal quality on my part. I will keep this table at the top of the blog for the next couple of weeks during the submissions cycle.

Click on the link under any journal's name to see a listing of the most cited law review articles in the journal between 2007 and 2011.

Updated 2014 rankings here!