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.”