Written and maintained by CASRAI Editorial Board
Last updated
Law review rankings provide standardized citation and impact metrics used to evaluate the scholarly reach, academic prestige, and judicial influence of legal periodicals. Within academic scholarship and the broader discipline of legal studies, the definitive citation ranking system is the Washington and Lee University School of Law (W&L) Law Journal Rankings. Operating as an open-access bibliometric platform, the W&L rankings evaluate hundreds of legal periodicals across rolling survey periods, guiding faculty tenure committees, student editors, and submitting authors.
What it is
The Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings is a specialized bibliometric database developed to assess legal periodicals based on quantitative citation performance. Unlike traditional science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields—where journal rankings are dominated by commercial journal impact factors published in Web of Science or Scopus—legal scholarship is distinguished by its reliance on student-edited law reviews. Because traditional bibliometric indexers largely omit student-edited legal journals, the legal academy relies on specialized ranking systems that systematically track citations in both scholarly literature and judicial case law. The W&L rankings synthesize raw citation frequencies, average citations per article, and publication velocity into composite scores, establishing an authoritative benchmark for evaluating journal impact across the legal discipline.
Who runs it and what it covers
The W&L Law Journal Rankings platform is maintained and published by the Law Library at Washington and Lee University School of Law. Accessible via its dedicated portal (go.wlu.edu/lawjournals), the database provides comprehensive coverage of legal literature:
- Periodical Scope: Tracks hundreds of legal periodicals worldwide, encompassing flagship general law reviews, specialized subject-matter journals, and interdisciplinary publications. Coverage includes both domestic United States journals and non-U.S. international legal titles.
- Survey Windows: Metrics are computed over rolling multi-year survey periods (typically standard five-year windows), ensuring that short-term fluctuations in citation spikes do not distort long-term institutional standings.
- Data Sources: The platform combines citation counts extracted from Thomson Reuters Westlaw searches (spanning federal and state court decisions alongside law review literature) with article-count figures derived from HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library and official publisher repositories.
- Core Metrics: Evaluates journals across four primary quantitative dimensions:
- Total Cites (TC): The aggregate number of citations received by a journal’s articles from judicial opinions and secondary literature over the survey span.
- Impact Factor (IF): The average number of annual citations generated per published article over the rolling period, measuring publication efficiency.
- Combined Score: A composite, normalized metric weighting Impact Factor at roughly one-third (33%) and Total Cites at roughly two-thirds (67%), scaled to 100.00 for the highest-scoring journal in any selected view. Ties are resolved mathematically using underlying calculations computed up to 15 decimal places.
- Currency Factor: A rapid-impact metric tracking citations within a rolling three-year window, measuring how swiftly newly published articles achieve citation uptake.
How to search or use it
Legal scholars, journal editors, and academic researchers navigate the W&L Law Journal Rankings interface through the following structured steps documented by the platform:
- Accessing the Rankings Portal: Navigate to the open-access portal at go.wlu.edu/lawjournals.
- Selecting Survey Span and Country Scope: Choose the preferred multi-year survey span from the primary drop-down menu, then specify the geographic scope by filtering to United States journals, Non-U.S. international journals, or all publications combined.
- Filtering by Editorial Structure: Use the editorial governance filter to distinguish between student-edited journals and peer-reviewed, refereed, or faculty-edited periodicals.
- Limiting by Subject Category: When targeting specialized scholarship, open the Subject drop-down menu to restrict results to one of more than 60 specialty legal categories, such as Intellectual Property, Environmental Law, Constitutional Law, Health Law, or International Law.
- Applying Journal Classification Filters: Refine results by selecting general flagship law reviews (the main journal of each law school) versus specialized topical reviews.
- Choosing Sorting Metrics: Select the ranking criterion to order the table—sorting by Combined Score (the default holistic measure), Impact Factor, Total Cites, or Currency Factor depending on the research objective.
- Analyzing Journal Metrics and Submissions Strategy: Review the resulting table to evaluate a journal’s publication volume, citation totals, and comparative standing. Scholars preparing article submissions cross-reference these rankings with law review authorship norms and submission cycle deadlines on platforms such as Scholastica to optimize article placement.
Strengths and limits
The W&L Law Journal Rankings provide essential bibliometric clarity within legal scholarship, though researchers must balance their quantitative outputs against discipline-specific constraints:
- Strengths:
- Captures the unique dual nature of legal impact by counting citations in both appellate court jurisprudence and academic legal commentary.
- Provides transparent, openly accessible metrics without gating essential data behind expensive individual subscriptions.
- Offers granular subject-matter filtering across more than 60 subfields, enabling fair comparisons among specialized journals rather than forcing comparisons only against general flagship reviews.
- Combines size-dependent metrics (Total Cites) with efficiency metrics (Impact Factor) through a balanced, weighted Combined Score.
- Limits:
- Citation lag: Relying on a rolling five-year window means newer journals or recent editorial shifts require several cycles to reflect in ranking positions.
- Article count definitions: Impact factor calculations include notes, comments, and book reviews alongside lead articles, which can depress the impact scores of journals publishing high volumes of student work.
- Jurisdictional bias: Because citation data originates predominantly from Westlaw’s United States legal databases, international non-common-law journals face structural under-citation.
- Exclusion of qualitative assessment: Metrics measure citation frequency rather than scholarly rigor, doctrinal originality, or pedagogical utility; researchers should not substitute numerical rank for holistic peer review.
Alternatives
The following table compares the W&L Law Journal Rankings with alternative journal evaluation platforms and citation indices used across legal scholarship and higher education:
| Platform | Operator | Core Metrics | Scope & Distinctions |
|---|---|---|---|
| W&L Law Journal Rankings | Washington and Lee University Law Library | Combined Score, Impact Factor, Total Cites, Currency Factor | Primary legal citation benchmark; tracks both judicial case citations and academic journals across 60+ subject categories. |
| Google Scholar Metrics (Law) | h5-index, h5-median | Ranks top 20 English-language law journals based on Google Scholar citation counts; does not categorize by specialized legal subfield. | |
| Web of Science (JCR) | Clarivate | Journal Impact Factor (JIF), Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) | Covers peer-reviewed interdisciplinary and international legal journals; excludes most student-edited American flagship law reviews. |
| Scopus (CiteScore / SJR) | Elsevier | CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), SNIP | Broad international and peer-reviewed legal coverage; limited inclusion of United States student-edited law reviews. |
| SSRN Legal Scholarship Network | Elsevier / SSRN | Download counts, abstract views, paper citations | Measures pre-publication interest and working paper circulation rather than formal journal-level citation impact. |
FAQ
What is the Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings?
The Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings is an authoritative, open-access citation indexing database maintained by the Law Library at Washington and Lee University School of Law. It tracks citation data and calculates relative rankings for hundreds of legal periodicals worldwide.
How is the Combined Score calculated in W&L rankings?
The Combined Score is a weighted composite index that assigns roughly one-third (33%) weight to a journal’s Impact Factor and roughly two-thirds (67%) weight to its Total Cites. The scores are normalized relative to the highest-scoring journal in the dataset, which receives a benchmark score of 100.00.
What is the difference between Total Cites and Impact Factor?
Total Cites measures the absolute volume of citations a journal receives from court opinions and secondary literature over a survey period. Impact Factor measures efficiency by calculating the average number of annual citations per article published, preventing high-volume journals from dominating rankings purely through size.
Do law review rankings track judicial case citations?
Yes. A distinctive feature of the W&L Law Journal Rankings is that its citation search protocol on Westlaw explicitly counts citations from federal and state court decisions as well as academic journals, capturing the practical judicial impact of legal scholarship.
How do submitting authors use law review rankings?
Authors use W&L rankings during submission windows to identify appropriate peer-reviewed and student-edited target journals, assess category-specific prestige within specialized subfields, and formulate tiered submission strategies across national and regional reviews.
Sources
- Washington and Lee University School of Law Library. “W&L Law Journal Rankings: Methodology and Scope.” Published by W&L Law Library, 2026. Read November 7, 2026. https://law.wlu.edu/library
- Washington and Lee University School of Law. “W&L Law Journal Rankings Database.” Published by W&L Law, 2026. Read November 7, 2026. https://go.wlu.edu/lawjournals
- HeinOnline. “Law Journal Library: Periodical Indexing and Coverage Standards.” Published by William S. Hein & Co., 2026. Read November 7, 2026. https://heinonline.org
- American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). “Evaluating Legal Periodical Metrics and Ranking Systems.” Published by AALL, 2026. Read November 7, 2026. https://www.aallnet.org
