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.

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.

During August 2023, the contents of the  WVU College of Law community in the Research Repository @ WVU had 12,498 new full-text downloads of the 5,775 total works archived in our collections. Readers came from 906 different institutions across 140 different countries and territories. This brings the total full-text downloads of scholarship from the College of Law collections to 549,677.

Law faculty scholarship was downloaded a total of 3,506 times in August 2023. The most downloaded articles from the  faculty scholarship collection last month are:

During July 2023, the contents of the  WVU College of Law community in the Research Repository @ WVU had 18,519 new full-text downloads of the 5,775 total works archived in our collections. Readers came from 852 different institutions across 144 different countries and territories. This brings the total full-text downloads of scholarship from the College of Law collections to 537,081.

Law faculty scholarship was downloaded a total of 4,213 times in July 2023. The most downloaded articles from the  faculty scholarship collection last month are: