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.