Faculty Scholarship

Details "an extensive citation analysis project conducted by the Drake Law Library. This study found that HeinOnline missed a significant rate of available citations (14.6 percent) in their ScholarCheck service, and it provides anecdotal data on some common HeinOnline citation-matching errors responsible for the missing citations...the article [also] provides recommendations for librarians, journals, and authors interested in raising scholarly visibility and improving the use of legal scholarly metrics."

"[C]itation metrics are used to compare schools and to evaluate scholars for promotion and tenure, for grant consideration, and for bestowing other awards and honors...To set high stakes on such an inaccurate number and call it “scholarly impact” stands to devalue all the other forms that scholarship can take. This article seeks to address that mis-valuation, first by surveying the history and reasoning behind these citation counts; then examining the varied forms and formats scholarship can take; and ending with a discussion of other measures, tools, and strategies for painting a more holistic picture of scholarly impact."

Anne-Wil Harzing's blog post argues that tending to competence, collaboration, care and communication will increase the chances that scholarly work will be cited.

"Using nearly 250,000 law review articles published on HeinOnline in a five-year period, the authors analyze citation patterns and characteristics of the articles such as title length, number of authors, article length, publication format, and more. The authors describe past citation studies and best practices in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The authors find that factors beyond article quality likely impact scholarly citations. Drawing from the lessons in the citation patterns, article characteristics, and SEO best practices, the authors offer techniques to increase the article citation counts of articles published in U.S. law journals."

Proposes three changes to make the assessment of scholarly impact more equitable: "citing to all authors, adopting persistent identifiers, and requiring diversity in citation."

"Articles available in open access formats enjoy an advantage in citation by subsequent law review works of 53%. For every two citations an article would otherwise receive, it can expect a third when made freely available on the Internet. This benefit is not uniformly spread through the law school tiers. Higher tier journals experience a lower OA advantage (11.4%) due to the attention such prestigious works routinely receive regardless of the format. When focusing on the availability of new scholarship, as compared to creating retrospective collections, the aggregated advantage rises to 60.2%. While the first tier advantage rises to 16.8%, the mid-tiers skyrocket to 89.7%. The fourth tier OA advantage comes in at 81.2%.

Citations of legal articles by courts is similarly impacted by OA availability. While the 15-year aggregate advantage is a mere 9.5%, new scholarship is 41.4% more likely to be cited by a court decision if it is available in open access format."

"This Article will identify existing barriers regarding the implementation of persistent identifiers among publishers of legal scholarship, as well as provide an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals. This Article concludes with a call to action for all stakeholders in legal publishing to adopt persistent identifiers and usher in a new generation for legal scholarship and other legal materials."

"This essay discusses the major issues that arise in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. It also explains important scholarly impact metrics, including the Leiter score and Google Scholar h-index, and the major sources of information regarding scholarly impact, including Google Scholar, Westlaw, HeinOnline, SSRN, and bepress."

"In February 2019, U.S. News & World Report announced a proposal to use HeinOnline data to publish a scholarly impact ranking of law schools. As a result, interest in using scholarly metrics to quantitatively assess legal scholarship soared...This article considers the views legal scholars expressed regarding the proposed ranking, contextualizing these ideas within broader principles of bibliometric analyses. It argues that although the U.S. News proposal died, legal bibliometric studies will persist and the academy should develop standards for the responsible creation and use of scholarly impact analyses."

"This article examines the new U.S. News scholarly impact ranking and its use of HeinOnline as a data source. It compares law journal and interdisciplinary scholarship citation metrics and explores how the exclusion of the latter may severely skew scholarly impact rankings against some law schools. The remainder of this article suggests strategies to improve the accuracy of citation metrics for legal scholars and promote the visibility of their scholarship."

"This article analyzes data collected in an empirical study of citation metrics. Between February 1, 2019 and April 30, 2019, the authors collected citation data from Google Scholar, HeinOnline, Westlaw, Lexis, SSRN, and Digital Commons repositories on randomly selected faculty members at U.S. law schools for the purpose of answering questions regarding fit and utility of citation metrics. Analysis of the citation data examines the impact of adoption of scholarly profiles, gender, and stage in the profession, and discipline, on exposure on citation with the conclusion that exposure results in increased citations."