Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops a statistical approach for inferring faculty quality from citation counts and determining when differences among law schools are significant. Statistical tests demonstrate that the distribution of citations within faculties closely follows the lognormal distribution, subject to small adjustments. This suggests a simple test for comparing faculties: whether they could be drawn from lognormal distributions with the same log mean. Under this approach, the geometric mean of citations is the most efficient measure for summarizing faculty quality. Using citation data collected from HeinOnline, this article provides a citation ranking for 195 law schools in the United States. Most differences between peer schools are statistically insignificant, and confidence intervals on citation ranks are extremely wide. Except for the highest‐ranked faculties, citation rankings provide little information on the relative quality of faculties.

中文翻译：

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法学院引文排名的统计方法

引文排名已成为对法学院学术影响力进行排名的流行方法。本文开发了一种统计方法，用于根据引用计数推断教师质量，并确定法学院之间的差异何时显着。统计测试表明，院系内的引用分布紧密遵循对数正态分布，但会进行小幅调整。这提出了一个用于比较能力的简单测试：它们是否可以从具有相同对数均值的对数正态分布中得出。在这种方法下，引用的几何平均值是总结教师质量的最有效的衡量标准。本文使用从 HeinOnline 收集的引文数据，提供了美国 195 所法学院的引文排名。同侪学校之间的大多数差异在统计上并不显着，并且引用排名的置信区间非常宽。除了排名最高的院系外，引文排名几乎没有提供有关院系相对质量的信息。