Everyone seems to love new rankings! Inspired by Dan Burk's lists of IP scholars by h-index and m-index, Christopher Yoo (Penn Law) calculated cumulative h-index and m-index rankings by school. He thought the results might of interest to Written Description readers. I'm posting them because I think they have some value in identifying schools with a strong commitment to IP scholarship, although I don't recommend relying on these rankings when choosing a school (nor, for that matter, do I recommend relying on US News IP or Law Street or Patently-O or any other numerical ranking).
h-index: A scholar's h-index is the maximum number of articles h such that each has received at least h citations. Burk used Scholarometer in May to compute the h-index for full-time AALS faculty whose major emphasis is (at least arguably) IP. Yoo used Burk's dataset to rank schools based on the sum of the h-indexes for all IP scholars at that school. (I have started at Stanford since Burk calculated his rankings, but my omission does not affect the results below.)
1. UC Berkeley (Samuelson, Merges, Menell, Van Houweling, Syed)
2. Harvard (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Fisher)
3. Stanford (Lemley, Goldstein)
4. Boston U (Gordon, Meurer, O'Rourke, Dogan, Gugliuzza)
4. Penn (Parchomovsky, Yoo, Wagner, Balganesh, Abrams)
6. NYU (Dreyfuss, Strandburg, Fromer, Beebe, Sprigman)
7. Duke (Reichman, Rai, Boyle)
8. UC Irvine (Burk, Reese, Arewa)
9. Michigan (Eisenberg, Litman)
10. Georgetown (Cohen, Tushnet, Thomas)
m-index: Burk's modified m-index is a scholar's h-index divided by the number of years in full-time law teaching. Because the m-index does not stabilize until well into a scholar's career, Burk only calculated the m-index for those teaching ≥10 years, so junior IP scholars are not included in this ranking, even if they have a high h-index. Yoo ranked schools by adding the m-indexes for scholars in Burk's dataset.
1. Harvard (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Fisher)
2. Penn (Yoo, Parchomovsky, Wagner)
3. UC Berkeley (Merges, Samuelson, Menell, Van Houweling)
4. Stanford (Lemley, Goldstein)
5. Georgetown (Tushnet, Cohen, Thomas)
6. Boston U (Meurer, Dogan, O'Rourke, Gordon)
7. UC Irvine (Burk, Reese, Arewa)
8. NYU (Strandburg, Dreyfuss, Beebe)
9. UC Hastings (Depoorter, Feldman, Lefstin)
10. Duke (Rai, Reichman, Boyle)
Combined h-index and m-index: To make an aggregate ranking, Yoo simply added the two rankings described above. The only school here that does not appear on both of the above lists is Illinois (Kesan, Heald, Wasserman).
1. Harvard
2. UC Berkeley
3. Penn
4. Stanford
5. Boston U
6. NYU
7. Georgetown
7. UC Irvine
9. Duke
10. Illinois
Update: These rankings were corrected 9/2/12 to add Sprigman, Syed, and Abrams.
