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.

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.