Harvard Law School’s faculty and fellows earned the top ranking for the total number of citations of their work on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), according to cumulative statistics released for 2011 (PDF). HLS faculty members captured five out of the top 10 slots – including the number one slot – among law school faculty in all legal areas.
Professor Lucian Bebchuk was ranked first among all law school faculty in terms of citations to his work. (Bebchuk also led all law professors in terms of total downloads of his work.) Bebchuk’s papers have attracted a total of more than 3,500 citations (as well as over 170,000 downloads).
In addition to Bebchuk, there were three HLS professors and one HLS senior fellow on SSRN’s list of the ten most cited law faculty:
- Steven Shavell, ranked 2 among all law school faculty
- Louis Kaplow, ranked 6 among all law school faculty
- Jesse Fried, ranked 7 among all law school professors
- Alma Cohen, ranked 9 among all law school faculty
SSRN is the leading electronic service for social science research, and its electronic library contains (as of December 2011) over 307,000 full-text documents by more than 176,000 authors.