About a week ago I posted a new law journal ranking (available here) which combines the rankings of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the US citations statistics by Washington & Lee University (W&L). The overall result does not look too bad but a couple of refinements could be made:
- First, the ARC ranking gives perhaps too much prominence to Australian (and New Zealand) journals. Thus, with respect to these journals, it may be more reliable just to use the W&L data.
- Second, as explained in my previous post, with respect the W&L data, I distinguish between the US ranking and the non US one. However, the non-US data may favour the Canadian journals, since in the US academics may feel more inclined to look to Canada than to legal journals from other continents. Thus, with respect to the Canadian journals, it may be more reliable just to use the ARC data.
- Third, it seems likely that both rankings underrate the EU law journals since Australian and US scholars may not have enough interest in topics of EU law. Thus, one could make the case for shifting the EU law journals (ie not all European journals but the ones with a core interest in EU law, e.g., ELR, ELJ, EBOR, ECFR, EBLR) up one rank.
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