I think disconnection from reality is distributed evenly across the business disciplines. But the other disciplines create the illusion of connection through their literature reviews and even body-citations to prior mathematical or statistical models. In law review articles, I don't see as many similar "hat tips" to prior research.
On some level, in a common law system (or what some like to think of as a common law system) it makes less sense to cite other scholars than it would in a code-law or civil-law system where precedent is officially frowned upon and where judges in search of authority are more likely to open an academic treatise than an official report on a prior case.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Allison" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, November 4, 2013 7:33:19 PM
Subject: Re: Citation Counts
Yes. Also, too many LR articles by law profs have no relation to reality. Same is true with much social science research, but they still cite each other fir reasons we have discussed.
John
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
-------- Original message --------
From: George Siedel <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 11/04/2013 6:02 PM (GMT-06:00)
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Citation Counts
Here's another piece of data. The Oct 21 NY Times article that was discussed recently on ALSBTALK noted that "43 percent of law review articles have never been cited in another article or in a judicial decision."
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 5:43 PM, Kurt Schulzke < [log in to unmask] > wrote:
Building on John Allison's comments below, lower citation counts for law reviews may be attributable in part to the fact that law review articles do not typically contain literature reviews like those found in PRJs for other disciplines. Over time, those literature reviews exponentially increase citation counts for landmark articles.
Along similar lines, law review articles liberally cite statutes, regulations, and case law as original sources, whereas, in other disciplines - like econ, marketing, finance and accounting - previous PRJ articles themselves serve as the original sources.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Allison" < [log in to unmask] >
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 9:35:45 PM
Subject: Re: Citation Counts
George,
I suspect that there are multiple reasons, including those you suggest. Law review articles typically do cite a lot of original sources, most of them probably devoting the great bulk of their references to such sources. Also, there are likely far fewer legal faculty total than there are in marketing, economics, psychology, and so on, because there are far more schools with such faculty than there law schools and research-productive business law faculties. In addition, the publication requirements at even the best law schools, even though their expectations have increased in the last 10-15 years, remain much lower than they are in most other academic disciplines.
There is also the fact that JDs don’t get the multiple-article bump from a Ph.D. dissertation that Ph.D. graduates from good schools often do. And the education of a JD graduate was not focused primarily on research, and for most law school graduates it was not focused on academic research at all.
John
John R. Allison
The Spence Centennial Professor of Business, and
Professor of Intellectual Property
McCombs School of Business
University of Texas at Austin
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From: Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk [mailto: [log in to unmask] ] On Behalf Of George Siedel
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 7:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Citation Counts
Hi everyone. Within the last year or so, several articles on legal citation counts have been published. I've provided some background information below. (I apologize for the length; please feel free to ignore.) The ultimate question that affects us is: Why are citation counts in law so low compared with other business school disciplines? Any thoughts? George
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Questions about citations of our research arise when business schools make promotion and tenure decisions. Some schools also ask faculty to include citation counts in their annual reports. It’s my impression that citations of legal research are far lower than citations in other business school disciplines, where citation counts per faculty member run into the thousands (based on Google Scholar searches). In contrast to these disciplines:
• · A 2012 study by Sisk et al. examined the total law journal citations for law faculty over the past five years. The leader was Yale, with a median of 435 cites per faculty, or 87 cites per year. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2109815 (See Table 2, page 16.)
• · A 2012 citation study by Phillips & Yoo also concluded that Yale was the leader, but with only 74 citations per faculty member per year. Harvard was second with 61 cites per year. http://works.bepress.com/james_phillips/1/
• · Another 2012 study by Eisenberg & Wells noted (in Table 2, page 10) that Law ranked 18 th out of the top 25 academic categories. The dominant academic categories are psychology and economics. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2084169
• · Leiter’s study of citations by specialty reveals that a legal scholar with a citation count of less than 1000 over a seven-year period would rank in the top ten in each of the 18 main legal categories, except for Constitutional Law. For example, to make the top ten in Labor & Employment Law, one needs only 33 cites per year. (As an aside, kudos to Frank Cross, who led the Law & Social Science category with 880 citations.) http://www.leiterrankings.com/faculty/2007faculty_impact_areas.shtml
• · The Phillips & Woo study noted above also lists citations by specialty. Total cites per year of less than 100 would result in a top ten ranking in all areas except Law and Economics and Public Law (which includes constitutional law).
Before relying on any of the above, please check my math!
The bottom line is that law professors do not fare well in citation counts when compared with scholars from other disciplines. As a test, I just did a Google Scholar search of a Marketing professor whose office is down the hall from mine. His first article in the results had 9426 cites. (However, he is one of the leading researchers in the field.)
This disparity in citation counts between law and other disciplines raises two questions. First, are there databases that would produce a larger number of law citations? The above researchers use Google Scholar, Lexis Nexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, and Scopus. I emailed Fred Shapiro (a librarian at the Yale Law School and author of the 2012 article in the Michigan Law Review “The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time”), asking him for search engine recommendations. He responded:
I do not regard Google Scholar as a good tool for systematic citation searching. I like HeinOnline for legal scholarship and Web of Science for social-science scholarship. Westlaw is OK but not as good, in my book, as HeinOnline or Web of Science.
Unfortunately, HeinOnline does not seem to generate large citation numbers for legal research. Can anyone suggest a better search engine for tracking down our citations?
The second question is: If citation counts for legal research are indeed lower than in other disciplines, what are the reasons? One possibility is that law review articles are lengthy and, although they are heavily footnoted, many of the footnotes cite original sources such as statutes, regulations and cases, rather than articles.
Perhaps a more likely possibility is that there is little cross-referencing among the fields and sub-fields in which legal scholars work. Wikipedia lists 105 areas of law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_of_law
These areas can be further divided into multiple sub-areas. For example, employment law can be broken down into some areas that are on the list--benefits, labor law, health and safety—and others that aren’t--discrimination, worker’s comp, compensation, etc. It is unlikely that someone writing on worker’s comp would cite employee benefits research. As one of the above authors, Sisk, noted in an email: “…specialization in law may disperse citations within fields as well as lead to something like fences around certain specialties….” And Posner notes in a recent Chronicle article entitled “Academe and the Judiciary at Odds” that:
If there are 4,000 law professors, there can be (at a guess) an average of 100 to 200 in each field. At that point, with scholars crowding into every field, each field becomes divided into subfields, placing generalists at a double disadvantage: They do not have time to keep up with so much scholarly writing, and specialists develop a specialized vocabulary that creates a barrier to understanding by nonspecialists. And as sub-fields expand, the scholars in each one find they have audience enough among their fellow specialists and so feel no need to try to reach a wider audience, an effort that would require them to retool their vocabulary.
Do you agree? Can you identify other reasons for low citation counts in law?
--
George J. Siedel
Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration
and Thurnau Professor of Business Law
Ross School of Business
University of Michigan
Tel: (734) 764-1392
http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyBios/FacultyBio.asp?id=000119791
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