In our most recent post on scholarly impact, we focused on downloads of papers in a single issue of our SSRN paper series. To expand upon our previous analysis, we decided to look for trends across multiple issues. Specifically, we looked at how many readers opened the email distribution and how many clicked through from their inbox to the paper posted on SSRN. Some observations:

Publishing smaller, more frequent issues to capture audiences throughout the academic year.

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.