Meta-Ranking (Online/Companion Journals) – 2023

One the limitations of the annual Meta-Ranking I publish is that it only applies to flagship law reviews at ABA-approved law schools in the US. One of the requests I get is to include secondary (or specialty) journals. With this page, I provide some initial insight into how the online or “companion” publications to flagship US law reviews published by ABA-approved law schools might fare as compared to the flagship journals in the Meta-Ranking.

Note: the MetaRank reported in the tables here refers to the equivalent MetaRank each journal would receive if compared on its own to the flagship Meta-Ranking. A “1000” in any column means the journal was not included in that database. A “401” in the wluRank column means the journal was contained in the Washington & Lee Rankings but was not ranked. More methodological details and discussion of limitations of these rankings are below, following the rankings.

I welcome feedback!

Online-Companion Rankings - 2023 (no modifier)

Online-Companion Rankings - 2023 (with +15 modifier)

Details about ranking and methods:

Notes: I have only included companion/online journals affiliated with flagship law reviews published by (or in collaboration with) ABA-approved law schools in the US. Furthermore, I have only assigned MetaRanks and onlineRanks to those journals are contained in either the Washington & Lee law journal ranking system or Google Scholar Metric or both. Journals not indexed in either of these rankings/metrics are not given a MetaRank or an onlineRank (they are given a “1000” value in each column to indicate not being ranked).

• prRank = US News Peer Reputation score ranking for the school (averaged over 10 years);
• usnRank = overall US News school ranking for the school (averaged over 10 years);
• wluRank = Washington & Lee Law Journal Ranking (note: “1000” means journal was not indexed; “401” means the journal was indexed but not ranked);
• gRank = Google Scholar Metrics ranking (note: “1000” means journal was not indexed).

In the first table, I have not added a modifier (+15 or +50, etc.) to the school rankings, although some commentary frequently suggests (e.g., on the now defunct submissions angsting threads on PrawfsBlawg) that adding such a modifier to a school ranking to distinguish the specialty journal from the flagship journal might be appropriate. The second table includes these ranking with a +15 modifier added (note that +15 works to devalue the ranking, as a lower value, e.g. 1, is best in this list). Otherwise, I use the same methodology as for the regular meta-ranking of flagship/general law reviews.

For an older, now somewhat outdated, ranking of online companion journals, you may refer to the ranking presented by the University of Illinois Law Review.