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Daily Archives: August 20, 2019

Journal Prestige and Journal Impact in Law

Cofone, Ignacio and Malé, Pierre-Jean G., Journal Prestige and Journal Impact in Law (July 5, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3415599 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3415599

“American legal scholars often ignore journals’ impact-factor and choose in which journal to publish based on publishing schools’ ranking. To investigate the relationship between school ranking and journal impact, we collect and analyze historical data from American law journal’s impact-factor and the ranking of their publishing law schools. We present three findings. First, there is a correlation between prestige ranking and impact-factor over the years, but the correlation is not perfect and it varies substantially over time. Second, journal impact-factor shows a larger inter-annual variation than school ranking. This means that impact-factor is a worse predictor of future journal impact than school ranking is of future school prestige. Third, journals published by better law schools counterintuitively have higher inter-annual variation in impact-factor but lower variation in impact-factor based ranking. We hypothesize that journals from high-ranked schools belong to a less homogeneous pool: few journals make most of the impact due to an exposure bias. Then, we consider authors’ utility from publishing in one journal or another. Authors’ optimal strategy will depend on whether they maximize prestige among their peers or impact on the discipline, and how risk-averse they are. Conditional on desiring impact, risk-averse scholars should look at school ranking and risk-neutral scholars should look at impact-factor.”

11 Rules Every Cyclist Should Follow

Outside – “Former professional cyclist Phil Gaimon, in partnership with editor Jonathan Hyla, gives us the rundown of The New Rules Of Cycling. His main messages? Don’t be a jerk, always wave to fellow cyclists, and don’t you dare litter.” [These rules apply every day, every where you are. Acknowledging strangers, picking  up litter and well, being… Continue Reading

Youth and Media

“Youth and Media (YaM) encompasses an array of research, advocacy, and development initiatives around youth (age 12-18) and digital technology. Interacting closely with other teams at the Berkman Klein Center, YaM draws on the knowledge and experiences of individuals with various backgrounds, including psychology, ethnography, sociology, education, media theory, and the law. Building upon this… Continue Reading

Smithsonian – The Wild Orchid Mystery

Includes orchid collection photos and a podcast: “You probably know orchids as the big, colorful flowers found in grocery stores and given as housewarming gifts. But those tropical beauties represent only a fraction of the estimated 25,000 orchid species worldwide. While their showy relatives fly off the shelves, North America’s more understated native orchids are… Continue Reading

Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection

OCLC: Operationalizing the BIG Collective Collection: A Case Study of Consolidation vs Autonomy, By Lorcan Dempsey, Constance Malpas, and Mark Sandler: “Prepared in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Library Initiatives, this report presents a framework for operationalizing the BTAA collective collection—a collection managed collaboratively across a network of libraries—and is focused specifically… Continue Reading

A Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels

“An analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 finds that children’s content – as well as content featuring children – received more views than other video” “The media landscape was upended more than a decade ago when the video-sharing site YouTube was launched. The volume and variety of… Continue Reading

“Boolean Girl” Is on a Mission: Teach Girls to Code and Build Electronics

All Together SWE – Learn how nonprofit “Boolean Girl” is bringing diversity to tech by engaging girls and under-represented groups with meaningful, hands-on instruction and sustained exposure to computer science and engineering. First, the good news: girls love coding.  Now, for the bad news: educators face far too many obstacles in teaching girls to code,… Continue Reading

You Can Finally See All Info Facebook Collected About You From Other Websites

BuzzFeed News – “…Facebook collects information about its users in two ways: first, through the information you input into its website and apps, and second, by tracking which websites you visit while you’re not on Facebook. That’s why, after you visit a clothing retailer’s website, you’ll likely see an ad for it in your Facebook… Continue Reading