Legal Commentary

In gauging scholarly productivity, a book is worth ___ law review articles.

Discuss. 

The back story: A colleague and I were discussing this topic, and my answer was two and the colleague's was five.  Upon discussion, we agreed that it mattered whether the book was assembled from previously published articles or whether it was "from scratch," and I revised my answer of "two" up a bit.  On further reflection, I realized that my initial answer diverged so much from my colleague's because my (outdated, misguided?) conception of a law review article is still based on the ideal of what (I thought) they were supposed to be when I started teaching long ago: namely, a mini-book of 50-100 pages that answers every question one can conceive about one's chosen topic. In fact, I found myself criticizing an article recently because it only defined "the problem" and didn't provide "the solution," though it promised to provide one in a future article.  Though it was a very good piece, it seemed to me like only half an article rather than a whole. Was I wrong? [It seems so.]

After more reflection on "productivity" (which is surely a scholarly term of art) , I had more questions. Is it nonsensical to try to gauge productivity by measuring the numbers of pages written or amount of time spent writing?  Shouldn't we gauge productivity by actually reading the works in question to try to decide how much they "count"? Are we uncomfortable with "quality" measures because they are too subjective, especially where the scholarship lies outside our own area of competence?  Is "productivity" somehow a matrix of quantity and perceived quality? Should one good article count more than three mediocre ones (assuming we could agree what "good" is)? Are citation counts a better measure of what we mean by productivity than number of articles published? Have most faculties reached consensus on these issues?