LAW WEEK COLORADO — U.S. News & World Report has established itself as a well known arbiter of measuring how colleges and universities stack up against each other. And now it’s in the process of developing a method for evaluating law schools based on their “scholarly impact” — how often faculty members publish scholarly articles and how many citations their work generates over a number of years. Although U.S. News is jumping into this particular research field now, comparing law schools by how often their faculty publish and get cited isn’t new. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago is known for launching this type of study of law professors. Gregory Sisk of the University of St. Thomas has carried on the study with a group of co-authors, and he estimated he’s been working on it for about 10 years. Sisk said the scholarly citations research isn’t trying to hold itself out as the single best way to measure the quality of law schools, or as the only way to measure scholarly impact. “The idea was not to come up with a ranking that would be everything to everybody, which U.S. News tried to do, but rather speak to one aspect of legal education,” he said. “In contrast with U.S. News, which suggests their ranking is universal and pulls in everything that’s of value to evaluating a law school. … Our view is this is one part of the cathedral that should be taken a look at.”