Google Rankings of the Most-Cited International Law Journals

For those of you who are trying to decide where to publish your article during this submission cycle, my friend and former colleague Rob Anderson has identified an interesting Google metric for measuring the most-cited international law journals. As he notes:

“The rankings are based on Jorge Hirsch’s “h-index,” which is an alternative to impact factor as a measure of a journal’s importance. The new Google rankings will be yet another entrant for ranking law reviews alongside Washington and Lee’s rankings.”

Here’s the Google Scholar h-index ranking of international law journals:

1. American Journal of International Law
2. Human Rights Quarterly
3. European Journal of International Law
4. American Journal of Comparative Law
5. Virginia Journal of International Law
6. European Law Journal
7. Chicago Journal of International Law
8. Journal of International Economic Law
9. Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations
10. Common market law review
11. Journal of International Criminal Justice
12. International Journal of Constitutional Law
13. Fordham International Law Journal
14. International Journal of Transitional Justice
15. German Law Journal
16. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
17. Human Rights Law Review
18. Cornell International Law Journal
19. Michigan Journal of International Law
20. New York University Journal of International Law & Policy

You can also see how international law journals rank relative to other journals here.

It is worth emphasizing that not every international journal is in the Google Scholar database, so one should take these rankings with a grain of salt. For example, neither the Harvard International Law Journal nor the Yale Journal of International Law is in the Google Scholar database. But at least for those journals that are in the database, it gives one a good sense of the relative influence of each journal.

If you are trying to compare the rankings of each journal where your article has been accepted, you can type the name of the journal into the Google Scholar search engine to get the h-index for that journal. The higher the h-index score, the more cited the journal.