On Friday, May 23, 2025, law librarian Stephanie Miller presented a new work-in-progress at the Mapping Scholarly Communications in Law Libraries conference. The conference was held at the University at Buffalo School of Law and hosted by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. The conference presented the results of the first major survey describing the extent of scholarly communications work being performed in academic law libraries in the United States in addition to presentations of papers written by members of the study team and other librarian scholars. Ms. Miller presented a paper titled "All in Good Time: An Analysis of Longitudinal Citation Data to Assess the Impact of Open Access Digital Archives."
From the abstract:
What is the impact of self-archiving platforms and institutional repositories on rate of citation to legal scholarship over time? While we know that greater exposure leads to higher rates of citation in the aggregate1, this study will use citation analysis to investigate the question of whether and to what degree these platforms have increased the rate of citation to legal scholarship over the lifespan of the published work. The study will analyze longitudinal citation data of a selection of lead articles published by flagship law journals across multiple time intervals to address questions such as: is the volume of citations to a given work at the time of publication, months, years, or even decades later greater if such platforms are used to increase exposure? Does it matter whether such tools are implemented contemporaneously with publication or implemented at a later stage in the lifespan of the work? Finally, what implications, if any, do these results have in the context of the long tail theory of legal scholarship?
Find more Stephanie Miller's scholarship on SSRN.