West Virginia College of Law Professor Caroline Osborne and librarian Stephanie Miller recently spoke at the Yale Virtual Symposium on Citation held on April 22-23, 2021. The symposium featured scholarship of law librarians and faculty on range of issues such citation analysis, scholarly impact metrics, link rot, and other empirical research in the use of citations. The event was sponsored by Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, The Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, AALL ALL-SIS Committee on Research and Scholarship, The Boulder Conference, and Legal Reference Services Quarterly.
Professor Osborne and Ms. Miller presented their paper, "The Scholarly Matrix Impact: An Empirical Study of How Multiple Metrics Create an Informed Story of A Scholar’s Work", which has been recently published in Legal Reference Services Quarterly. All papers presented at the symposium will be published in a forthcoming volume from the Hein Company.
From the Abstract:
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.