This guide includes tips for promoting your scholarship, increasing citations to your work, and raising your scholarly profile.
Consider the Impact of Article Elements
- keep article titles short and avoid colons when possible [1]
- include an abstract and table of contents, as these elements correlate with higher citation [2]
- carefully consider the abstract wording to ensure it both represents key concepts and incorporates the terms other researchers use
- to identify keywords, consider using JSTOR labs text analyzer https://www.jstor.org/analyze. [3]
Make Scholarship Freely Accessible and Easily Discoverable
- secure permission to post your scholarship
- when an article is accepted for publication, inquire whether the publishing journal will assign a DOI as part of the publication process
- upload your scholarship to open access repositories like SSRN (freely accessible articles have a 53% citation advantage) [4]
- encourage others to cite the final version of your work by adding a notice on the first page of the draft along the lines of “please do not cite to this preprint without the express permission of the author”
- replace draft working papers with published versions and update the citation so it is complete
- make PDFs searchable and include the title, author, and keywords in PDF metadata to improve discoverability [5]
Curate Profiles
HeinOnline
Google Scholar
- https://scholar.google.com
- authors must create their own profiles with a Google account
- add your affiliation and areas of interest, and link to your Drake Law profile page, biography, and university email (Google will email a verification request to that account)
- search for and add your publications, eliminate duplicate entries, and delete works authored by someone else
- make sure your profile is set to public
ORCID
- https://orcid.org
- it is a unique, persistent ID and complete master list of an author’s publications
- author must create an ID profile but can add a librarian as a trusted individual to curate
- add your affiliation, education and qualifications, memberships and service, funding, and scholarly works, and link to your Drake Law profile page
Drake Faculty Profile
Other Repositories to Consider:
Distribute Scholarship and Track Impact
- select up to 12 SSRN eJournal subject matter classifications to distribute to a wide audience
- send Taylor Johnson information about any new scholarship, speaking events, etc. for dissemination on law school social media
- use your own social media account to discuss developments in your field and promote your work
- track online and social media impact using altmetrics tools [6]
[1] Rob Willey & Melanie Knapp, How to Increase Citations to Legal Scholarship, 18 Ohio St. Tech. L.J. 157, 187–88 (2021)
[2] Lee Petherbridge & Christopher A. Cotropia, Should Your Law Review Article Have an Abstract and Table of Contents? An Empirical Analysis, 85 Miss. L.J. 295, 303 (2016)
[3] Bonnie J. Shucha, Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility, 40 Legal Reference Servs. Q. 81, 112 (2021)
[4] James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson & Caroline Osborne, The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews, 97 J. Pat. & Trademark Off. Soc’y 4, 13 (2015)
[5] Bonnie J. Shucha, Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility, 40 Legal Reference Servs. Q. 81, 102-03 (2021)
[6] Bonnie J. Shucha, Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility, 40 Legal Reference Servs. Q. 81, 112 (2021)
