LibGuides: Faculty Services (Law Library): Increasing Citations

Citation Metrics

How to Increase Citations to Legal Scholarship
Rob Willey & Melanie Knapp, 18 Ohio St. Tech. L.J. 157 (2021). Characteristics of well-cited articles (longer articles, short titles, popular topics.)
Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility
Bonnie Shucha. 40 L. Ref. Serv's. Q. 81 (2021). Things authors can do, such as promote article on social media, include it in author profile pages, create titles and abstracts that maximize discoverability, etc.
Karen L. Wallace, Rebecca Lutkenhaus & David B. Hanson, Assessing Heinonline as a Source of Scholarly Impact Metrics
114 Law Libr. J. 395 (2022). Contains recommendations for promoting legal scholarship for law journals (p. 425) and authors, including using DOI (digital object identifiers).
Rob Willey & Melanie Knapp, SSRN's Impact on Citations to Legal Scholarship and How to Maximize It
45 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 475, 493 (2023). How posting articles to SSRN can increase citation counts, plus other characteristics of well-cited papers.

Make your existing scholarship freely available on open access platforms such as SSRN, if you have the rights to do so. Most law reviews allow for posting works online.
Create scholarship profiles on Google Scholar, Orcid, SSRN, and Heinonline. Some of these services can automatically import works from the other. See the Promote Your Scholarship tab of this guide. Be sure to upload searchable PDFs of your articles, be sure to convert image-only pdfs by using optical character recognition (OCR). Be sure to include keywords that accurately reflect the content of the article.
Obtain an Orcid ID to help resolve name ambiguity issues (authors publish under different names, different authors with similar names). Try to keep your author name consistent in the various scholarship profiles.

Consider working with a co-author. Studies show increased citation counts for co-authored works.
Write on a timely topic.
Take advantage of opportunities to discuss your work in the development phase, to increase the quality of your work as well as awareness of your work.
Use a short, simple title for your article. Aim for fewer than seven words. Avoid a colon in the title. Use keywords in the title that describe the article's contents.
Write a brief abstract containing keywords that accurately describe the content of the work.
Include a table of contents at the beginning of the article.
According to one study, write longer articles because readers tend to just read one section of the article anyway. The more different sections you have, the more hits on your article. Note that most law reviews require submissions between 20,000 and 30,000 words.
Cite to yourself, when appropriate.
Pre-publication: post your work to SSRN and tag your work to be included in up to twelve SSRN subject matter eJournals. Include more detailed SSRN keywords.

Regularly update your scholarship profiles to add new works.
Post links to your scholarship on your CV, LinkedIn, professional websites and social media

Make the full text of back content available for open access (journal website, institutional repository, SSRN), as well as on Westlaw, Lexis and HeinOnline.
Get the journal listed in directories (see links below)
Long articles (36-90 pages), short titles without colons, and writing on popular topics. How to Increase Citations to Legal Scholarship Willey & Knapp 2021.
Promote articles on social media.
Use digital object identifiers. Assessing Heinonline as a Source of Scholarly Impact Metrics, Wallace, et. al, 2022; Craigle, Adopting DOI in Legal Citation: A Roadmap for the Legal Academy 2021.
Use article assessment algorithms. Hackett, An Analysis of Factors that Impact Citation Counts (2013).
Increase article findability through effective titles, abstracts, and metadata. Increasing Article Findability Online 2017