Taking Empirical Stock of the Best Corporate and Securities Articles
43 Pages Posted: 7 May 2009 Last revised: 24 Jun 2009
Date Written: May 6, 2009
Abstract
Since 1959 the Corporate Practice Commentator (CPC) has published an annual compendium of “the most original and useful contemporary writing” within the fields of corporate and securities law. Since 1994 the CPC also has conducted an annual survey of the Best Corporate and Securities Articles published and indexed within the past calendar year. This project, prepared in connection with the AALS Conference on Business Associations, empirically examines attributes of 177 Best Corporate and Securities articles and their authors from 1994 to 2008, as well as analyzes their impact on academic papers as well as judicial opinions. To provide context, these articles are compared to 229 articles published in the CPC and 81 articles published in the top three student-edited journals during approximately the same time period.
Unlike other citation studies, this project does not seek to measure quality. This is because the project features a dataset of articles whose purported quality already has been adjudged by the authors’ peers. Although this project proceeds to identify the authors and types of articles that generate superior citation counts, these results should not be understood as any sort of normative ranking of quality, but merely as a positive portrait of the Best Corporate and Securities scholarship.
Keywords: Citation Analysis, Best Corporate and Securities Articles, Legal Scholarship, Peer Selection, Rankings
JEL Classification: C1, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation