Research Repository Update: October 2023

During October 2023, the contents of the  WVU College of Law community in the Research Repository @ WVU had 20,581 new full-text downloads of the 5,790 total works archived in our collections. Readers came from 1,454 different institutions across 160 different countries and territories. This brings the total full-text downloads of scholarship from the College of Law collections to 585,387.

Law faculty scholarship was downloaded a total of 5,411 times in October 2023. The most downloaded articles from the  faculty scholarship collection last month are:

Research Repository Update: September 2023

During September 2023, the contents of the  WVU College of Law community in the Research Repository @ WVU had 14,551 new full-text downloads of the 5,775 total works archived in our collections. Readers came from 1173 different institutions across 141 different countries and territories. This brings the total full-text downloads of scholarship from the College of Law collections to 574,852.

Law faculty scholarship was downloaded a total of 3,870 times in September 2023. The most downloaded articles from the  faculty scholarship collection last month are:

Observations on Scholarly Impact, October 2023

This semester, we have been curious as to the impact of promotion of our faculty scholarship, specifically our institution’s SSRN paper series. Our inquiry extended to how broadly a work is promoted, distributed, and how descriptive is its metadata via SSRN.  We typically distribute issues of our paper series multiple times throughout an academic year.  Some observations:

Downloads of works with tiles that include a case name increased by 21% in the week after distribution. No additional promotion efforts were undertaken during that time frame, for this example.

Observations on Scholarly Impact, September 2023

As of June 30, 2023, we reached a meaningful milestone in scholarly impact data collection at WVU Law.  With five years of download and citation data to consider, trends emerge more clearly and we begin to make a number of practical observations.  A few early ideas worth sharing:

Prioritize scholarship in the institutional repository ("IR"). Downloads from our IR outperform downloads from SSRN by over 60% reflecting a broader audience attracted by our IR.  We recognize that the body of scholarship hosted in the IR is different than the body of scholarship hosted in SSRN but by a margin of only 15%. Prioritizing scholarship in the IR does not substitute posting to SSRN. Both are recommended to maximize exposure and dissemination of scholarship.

New Citations to WVU Law Scholarship, April to June 2023

The scholarship of West Virginia University College of Law faculty members is frequently cited as authority in numerous legal disciplines. The following is a list of faculty authored works cited and made available on Westlaw Precision between April 1, 2023 and June 30, 2023.