For the second straight month, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, College of Law tops all US law schools in the number of new downloads per paper posted to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in the last twelve months.
SSRN is a website that promotes scholarship in economics, finance, accounting, management, and law. It contains more than 300,000 documents and bases its rankings on readership of scholarly publications.
Academic papers can be posted to SSRN by the author. Many scholarly papers are published to SSRN and similar sites before being submitted to academic journals. This is beneficial because it allows the authors to gather comments that can be incorporated into their papers before they are published in journals and also because it allows widespread dissemination of scholarly papers before they are published in journals that have restricted access.
“Overall, we rank 28th—and 10th among public law schools—in total new downloads,” said Gregory M. Stein, associate dean for faculty development and the Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen & Carpenter Distinguished Professor of Law. “But UT is far smaller than any of the schools ranked ahead of us. When you examine the downloads on a per-paper basis, we are at the top of the list.”
Twenty-seven College of Law faculty members have posted papers to SSRN.