Professor Bainbridge has an insightful write-up here, entitled “The Social Science Research Network Has Jumped the Shark.” Some highlights:
The UCLA Law Library has notified our faulty that SSRN has announced “significant and unwelcome changes,” including:
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- SSRN is discontinuing its Research Paper Series at the end of July.
- Already-published papers and book chapters will no longer be eligible for posting on SSRN after July.
- SSRN will require authors submitting preprints or working papers to select a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, so long as appropriate attribution is given.
Read Professor Bainbridge’s full post here.
Added 6/5/26: Professor Bainbridge has an update: SSRN Responds to My Complaints With Changes and/or Clarifications. Looks like worst won’t come to pass (yet). Read Professor Bainbridge’s update here. The full SSRN statement is here.
The real problem is the enormous dishonesty among law professors and other scholars (read Failing Law Schools, 2012, if you have any doubt about the level of deceit among professors and deans in the legal academy). SSRN’s professor rankings were one objective indicator concerning whose work is having a real impact, and for professors working in lower-tier law schools, this was one of the few ways of showing we were successful scholars despite working at lower-tier law schools. But despite SSRN’s warning, “Caution: do not try to game the system,” it seems like there was system manipulation based on my experience. I had been getting “Top 10%” and “Top 30,000 Authors” emails from SSRN for years. In tooling around on SSRN in late 2019 I saw that I outranked famous scholars including Erwin Chemerinsky and Alan Dershowitz, which was a surprise to me. I mentioned it to a colleague at TSU and overnight Chemerinsky’s ranking was elevated enormously, without additional papers uploaded. It would appear that someone did not like the fact that I was ranked 11192 and he was 11504 and so his ranking jumped suddenly to around 6000 as I recall (I printed out the other stats but not the “new” rank of around 6000). It would appear that perhaps someone “decided” that Chemerinsky should outrank me, so “changed” the facts by changing the stats overnight on one of the world’s largest repositories of scholarship and usage/citation data. So the system was not perfect, but at least it was an objective measure of scholarly impact. With the level of deceit and falsification of data in the legal academy, we need more objectivity, not less – and we need systems that truly cannot be “gamed.” The SSRN documents relevant to this post can be obtained by email: deana@sacks.law.