At SSRN, we have always believed that research should speak for itself. As we refocus our platform around the needs of individual researchers, faster posting, better discoverability, and stronger research integrity measures, we have made the difficult decision to retire our current Rankings features. 

Rankings of papers, authors, and institutions within some disciplines have been features of SSRN for many years, and we know they matter to those communities. However, maintaining them requires significant product and development resourcing, which as some have noticed we have struggled to allocate. Going forward, we want to put that investment into the parts of the platform that impact researchers across all the disciplines who use SSRN. 

What we are keeping is the data that we hope matters most to you as an author. Download counts and citation statistics will continue to be recorded and displayed on your individual papers and author profile, so you can always see how your work is travelling and who is engaging with it. 

We recognize this change will not be welcome to everyone, and we are genuinely interested in your feedback. If rankings are important to your work or institution, we want to hear about why you find them useful. We may revisit the idea of various rankings as the platform evolves. As always, you can share your thoughts with us at ideas@ssrn.com. 

Rankings will be live on SSRN until the end of June and will then be removed, which means that SSRN rankings will no longer be updated or accessible after July 1st.