As you know, I think citation counting and ranking is silly at best and pernicious at worst. Sure, it might bear some relation to quality, but if you want to know who writes good work, you actually read the work and think about it carefully. You don’t count downloads, or citations, or inbound links, or engage in any such popularity contests.

I think you’re right that rankings are fundamentally a distraction from other, fuller, conversations about what constitutes quality in legal writing, what people are reading and why, and (egads!) the substance of what people are writing about. It’s very simple to count numbers and that’s a big part of the problem.

In a way, the whole thing seems like a hangover from the heyday of law and econ, when a reductive quantification of very complex phenomena was offered in ways that often overshadowed the proper object of study.

One real benefit to those conferences, though, is at least in that area the scholarship field is much more egalitarian – presentations are grouped by subject and not “impact” and as a result you have the opportunity to learn about some really great ideas and scholarship in areas of interest that you otherwise wouldn’t have seen (a few SSRN subscriptions don’t hurt, either). You also have the opportunity to present your scholarly ideas to others interested in the field, and to make new connections (in many senses of that word).

Perhaps these benefits are worth the cost of hearing some incomplete ideas and whatever drawbacks there are to the mega-conference.