Inside Higher Ed reports that the Board of Directors of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies has written a 5 page letter to U.S. News & World Report to "express concern" about its plans to create a law school "scholarly impact" ranking based on HeinOnline data. The letter says that
"HeinOnline’s present citation-measurement system has three principal problems: (1) it is biased against interdisciplinary legal scholarship; (2) it omits all book manuscripts and chapters; and (3) it systematically undervalues the academic contributions of junior scholars, which would inhibit law schools from recruiting diverse faculties."They add that "For instance, Google Scholar’s database of citations includes nearly all academic publications, including books. It can also be tailored in different ways, such as giving more weight to recent publications. While Google Scholar currently contains some attribution errors, so does HeinOnline, and data scientists are already developing ways to clean and harvest more accurate citation data from Google Scholar."
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