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. 

Based on data pulled from Hein, U.S. News will introduce a new scholarly impact ranking later this year. While this new ranking has the potential to improve the overall law school rankings, it opens the door to a wide range of potential issues from citation cartels to keyword stuffing to less focus on important but less well-known areas of the law. Using lessons from the SEO world, the authors conclude with a detailed discussion of these potential problems.

How to Increase Citations to Legal Scholarship (Originally titled: Hein, U.S. News, and How to Increase Citations)

Academic librarians have long highlighted faculty publications inside of the library’s walls using faculty publication displays and other methods. In today’s environment where scholarly output is i...

The Library’s Role in Highlighting Faculty Scholarship

INTRODUCTION: When U.S. News & World Report announced that it would rank law schools’ scholarly impact, U.S. News asked law schools to work with HeinOnline, a legal database, to ensure the accuracy of the database-created faculty author profiles because they would be using Hein’s database to gather citation metrics to measure scholarly impact. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM: This practice article describes a project at UNC Chapel Hill in the law library to ensure that their faculty publications were included in HeinOnline’s database and that HeinOnline Author Profiles were accurate. This case study helps librarians tackling either similar law library projects or similar projects throughout academia as metrics gathering for scholarly impact in a variety of manners, including educational rankings, becomes more prevalent. NEXT STEPS: Following this project, Hein contacted UNC to inform the law library they had identified an additional 119 articles for faculty members not previously attached to UNC faculty Hein Author Profiles. Some implications from this project are unclear and changing methodology, scalability issues, authority control concerns, lack of capturing interdisciplinary works, and an increased workload for librarians. Librarians, especially Scholarly Communications Librarians, are well equipped to promote our faculty’s scholarship by understanding the methodology of these educational ranking systems and by connecting our faculty and their research to the database tools of our field. This article represents just one field, but the implications apply more broadly.

https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/12884/galley/12561/download/

Allison N. Symulevich

Papers

Using Law School Faculty Author Profiles to Promote Impact: The U.S. News & World Report Saga Continues