Total Scholarly Impact: Law Professor Citations in Non-Law Journals

Abstract

In this article, we demonstrate that the citation counts and other author information available through the Web of Science database has made non-law citations possible to assemble and assess in a manner similar to the Sisk et al. methodology and the Hein legal citation study by Paul J. Heald and Ted Sichelman. A true apples-to-apples comparison, however, is not possible at this time given differences in the respective databases and search engines, as we explain in more detail in Part II.

Nevertheless, our study does serve as a demonstration project, showing that, with additional refinement of databases and search capacities, it is possible to capture the degree to which legal scholars are publishing in non-law journals and the extent to which that work is cited in law and non-law journals. We contend that this breadth of work and citations in non-law journals are a representation of interdisciplinary work by law faculty and its influence within and outside of legal scholarship. This is by no means a trivial body of work: In our five-year study period (2012-2018), over 600 tenured law faculty from the twenty-five schools in our study published almost 3,000 articles in the Web of Science database (with the "Law" category excluded) and received close to 20,000 citations to those articles during that period. Clearly, a good number of law faculty work at the core of interdisciplinary engagement-they publish in non-law journals, and those publications are recognized in law and non-law journals.

Currently, however, the impact of this work is largely being ignored. The Sisk et al. studies recognize the impact of this work only in terms of citations to non-law publications in law journals. And because the Hein study counted only citations to law journals in law journals, this body of interdisciplinary work will not appear in any measure of that study" But as our results show, there is another important dimension to interdisciplinary work-publication in non-law journals-and another metric of impact-citations to that body of work in non-law journals.