Impact Factors and Citations

On March 1, 2012, the Washington and Lee School of Law released its 2011 list of Law Journal Rankings with the top 10 law journals listed here. The project ranks legal journals based on the number of times they have been cited over the preceding eight years as a measure of their impact on legal scholarship. W&L Law’s ranking system is based on a composite of each journal’s impact factor—the average annual number of citations to the journal’s articles—and the total number of citations to the journal in the preceding eight years. Complete rankings and a detailed description of the methodology are available at its web site. The W&L Law rankings are considered the authority on journal quality and are used by authors to select journals in which to publish.

Brooklyn Law School Library’s new Lib Guide entitled Brooklyn Law School Law Journals: Impact Factors and Citations has data for Brooklyn Law School’s four student-edited law journals: The Brooklyn Law Review, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, The Journal of Law and Policy, and The Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law. The guide gives the combined score, impact factor (calculated by taking the number of citing articles in the JLR database and dividing that by number of items published by the journal), citations from journal articles, and citations from federal and state court cases. It also provides the 2012-2013 Editorial Boards for each of the journals.