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Faculty Scholarship Support

The purpose of this guide is to assist law school faculty in the production and promotion of their scholarly activities.

Tips on Posting to Open Access Repositories

Here are some general tips on posting to platforms like SSRN:  

  • Craft detailed abstracts (at least 275 words)
  • Include descriptive keywords (at least 6 terms)
  • Favor specific keywords over general keywords (e.g., "First Amendment" is general, while "compelled speech" is specific)
  • Inserting keywords directly into the abstract can help search engines index the article; this also holds for keywords in titles
  • Make sure that your author agreement allows you to post preprints and the final version
  • Post preprints early and replace them with the final version shortly after publication
  • When posting preprints, encourage citation to the final version by including language like "Please do not cite to this preprint without the express permission of the author"
  • Verify that the metadata embedded within your article is accurate and exists for the title, author, and keywords
  • Link to articles on social media, especially Twitter/X; also consider linking from your blog, website, or email signature

Adapted from:  

Characteristics that Correlate to Increased Citations in Legal Scholarship

Using over 250,000 law review articles published over a five-year period, Rob Willey and Melanie Knapp analyzed citation patterns and their relation to characteristics such as title length, number of authors, article length, publication format, etc. to derive characteristics that correlate to increased citations in legal scholarship. Select findings are summarized in the table below. Rob Willey & Melanie Knapp, How to Increase Citations to Legal Scholarship, 18 Ohio St. Tech. L. J. 157 (2021).

Recommendation Details Page
DO — Write long articles

Top articles averaged 63 pages per article.

The most frequently occurring page lengths for top articles were 68 and 66 pages respectively.

79 percent of top articles were between 36-90 pages.

By comparison, less cited articles averaged 27 pages, per article and 72 percent ranged between 2-35 pages.

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DO — Keep titles short

Top articles averaged 52 characters per title.

The most frequently occurring title lengths for top articles were 27 and 32 characters respectively.

Only 6.8 percent of top article titles had over 100 characters.

By comparison, less cited articles averaged 70 characters per title and 18 percent had over 100 characters per title.

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DON'T — Use colons in your title

Only 32 percent of top articles had a colon in the title.

Comparatively, 55 percent of less cited articles had a colon in the title.

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DO — Write on a popular/timely topic

Articles on trending topics appear to garner more citations per article than articles on other topics.

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CONSIDER — Publishing in widely accessible journals

Limited data indicates that journals available on Hein have more citations per article than those with embargoes or not available.

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DO — Publish in a top journal

37 percent of top articles were published in one of 2018 W&L Law Journal Rankings top-ten journals.

Only 4 percent of less cited articles were published in one of 2018 W&L Law Journal Rankings top-ten journals.

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CONSIDER — Publishing with a co-author

Our data only showed a slight difference in number of authors per paper between different segments, but other researchers have found publishing with a co-author to be beneficial.

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