Last week, a faculty member asked me to compile a list of the 100 most cited law review articles in Constitutional law. It turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be, so I thought I’d share how I did it.
In the Hein Online Law Journal Library, go to the advanced search. In the search for box, enter a percent sign. This will allow you to retrieve all results without having to choose a particular keyword. Next, select a subject (area of law) or leave it at all subjects if you want a general ranking. Then scroll down a bit to the sort by pull down box and change it to Number of Times cited. Run the search.
In the search results page, change the number of results returned from 25 to 100. That’s it – a quick and easy way to compile the most cited law review articles.
A caveat – Note that it only counts citations to other sources available in Hein Online, so it’s not a true measure, especially for more interdisciplinary articles which may have been cited by non legal journals.
Since the faculty member for whom I compiled the list is a Zotero user, I went one step further and created the list as a library that he could access in Zotero. This was very easy to do by capturing the cites into my Zotero account, creating a group for the cites and then sharing it with him so he could access it in his Zotero account.