Rankings redux

I just posted, over at my own blog, a question about whether touting SSRN "top 10 download" status would be one useful way to help people become aware of what the faculty of a school has been doing in terms of research. On the one hand, it's some indication of productivity and interest; on the other, SSRN deals with articles and not all of the other forms of scholarship, and it might be possible to game this system, too. I don't know if emphasizing such things would become so much "noise" (a la car alarms, fancy brochures about law schools that tend to come out in early September, the rankings themselves) or whether law professors would find this type of information interesting or useful. If you want to discuss this, you could either do that here at MoneyLaw or over at my blog. If SSRN downloads wouldn't be useful, would something else be useful? And--this is the more important question--would monitoring this sort of thing create behavior that we don't want to encourage?