10 Most-Cited Tax Scholars in the U.S., 2016-2020

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited tax professors in the U.S. for the period 2016-2020 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May/early June of 2021, and that the pre-2021 database did expand a bit since then).  Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten.    Faculty for whom roughly 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area."

Tax

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	Reuven Avi-Yonah	University of Michigan	420	64
2	Michael Graetz	Columbia University	380	77
3	David Weisbach	University of Chicago	310	58
4	Daniel Shaviro	New York University	300	64
5	Victor Fleischer	University of California, Irvine	270	50
	Lawrence Zelenak	Duke University	270	63
7	Alan Auerbach	University of California, Berkeley	210	70
	Joseph Bankman	Stanford University	210	66
9	David  Gamage	Indiana University, Bloomington	200	43
10	Leandra Lederman	Indiana University, Bloomington	190	55
	Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Louis Kaplow	Harvard University	950	65
	Daniel Hemel	University of Chicago	500	36
	Kristin Hickman	University of Minnesota	440	51
	Brian Galle	Georgetown University	290	48
	Yair Listokin	Yale University	230	46

(A note on the limitations of the Westlaw database is worth remarking on here.  James Hines, an economist at Michigan, who holds a joint appointment in both economics and law, is a very major tax scholar, but got fewer than 190 citations in the law review database during this five year period.  During that same time period, he received more than 5,000 citations according to Google Scholar!  Of course, most of those would have been in economics, rather than law, journals, as well as books, dissertations, working papers, and journals in cognate disciplines to economics and law.  Similarly, Reuven Avi-Yonah had more than 2,500 citations according to Google Scholar for the period 2016-2020, and David Weisbach had nearly 2,000 citations according to Google Scholar.   For scholarly impact in law specifically, the Westlaw database is probably still a better metric, even if it understates total scholarly impact and even if it misses some outstanding scholarsa, like Hines.)