U.S. News announced in 2019 that it was planning to launch a ranking of law school faculty. As of summer 2021, U.S. News appears to have retreated from those plans (see below).
U.S. News further explained its methodology for its scholarly impact ranking. U.S. News stated that it would be focusing on law review citations though it might consider cases and its methodology would continue to evolve. U.S. News also stated it was currently impracticable to consider other databases like Google Scholar
Heinonline explained its role in U.S. News ranking in this April 22, 2019 post. Hein stated that it would provide U.S. News with "citation metrics" but would not be involved with development of the ranking methodology. Hein stated that it intended to verify faculty rosters, account for name variations and create faculty lists to submit to U.S. News. Hein also stated it would review its Scholarcheck citation analysis for possible errors.
On February 25th, 2019, Hein announced its collaboration with U.S. News on the scholarly impact project. It stated that U.S. News would request names and "other details" of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty for Fall 2018. These names would be "linked to citations and publications of these individuals that were published in HeinOnline in the past five years." A scholarly ranking would be compiled form "the mean citation per faculty member, the median citation per faculty member, and the total number of publications".
U.S. News announced on February 13, 2019, that it planned to expand its law school data collection to include scholarly impact for full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. U.S. News collected data from law schools on tenured and tenured faculty. It planned to use this data to "link" faculty with publications and citations for the previous five years found in Heinonline's database for legal periodicals.
FAQ sheet largely repeating U.S. News approach, i.e. it is compiling a list of tenured and tenure track faculty; will connect these names to publications in Hein; and will rank based on a methodology including mean number of publications, median number of publications and total publications.
