Legal Research News and Information with an Emphasis on Wisconsin
HeinOnline recently introduced a new feature called PathFinder that offers more robust subject searching. PathFinder is a multi-level subject taxonomy in which broad research concepts are divided into increasingly granular levels. Both text and graphical interfaces are available as shown below. PathFinder is available as a search option from the HenOnline Law Journal Library …
After raising numerous concerns from the legal academic community, Brian Leiter reports that U.S. News has decided not to produce its own scholarly impact ranking. Chief among these concerns is that the exclusion of interdisciplinary scholarship and books in the ranking would create an incomplete representation of law faculty scholarly impact, skewing especially heavily against schools with …
Last week, our UW Law Librarians teamed up with our External Affairs team to put on a very well-received in-house program for our faculty and staff on Increasing Scholarly Visibility: Social Media & Discoverability. It was the second of a two-part series on scholarly visibility. Part one, which our librarians presented in July, covered scholarship …
Maximizing the scholarly access, impact, and visibility of our faculty is a core part of our mission at the UW Law Library. Over the last few years, but especially since US News announced their new scholarly impact ranking in 2019, we developed a successful program to make faculty scholarship accessible online, improve scholarly impact, and …
On the latest episode of the WI Law in Action podcast from the UW Law Library, host Kris Turner interviewed me, Bonnie Shucha, Associate Dean and Director of the Law Library. I discuss my recent paper, “Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics Accuracy and Promoting Scholarly Visibility,” which I presented at …
Contrary to assertions that senior faculty tend to be less productive, Inside Higher Ed reports that a new study of academic productivity says that older professors publish as much as their younger colleagues. These senior scholars do tend to publish fewer conference papers than younger colleagues but keep pace with them in terms of published …
82% of law review articles have zero citations within the first five years. 82%. This grim finding is from a recent study by Rob Willey and Melanie Knapp of George Mason University Law Library who reviewed nearly 250,000 law review articles published in HeinOnline from 2015-2019. Some articles, however, are cited significantly more often. What …
ScholarSift is a new resource that legal scholars and law librarians should keep an eye on. Using artificial intelligence, it analyzes the text and citations of law journal articles to find other relevant law journal articles. You can either search for articles already in the database or upload your own draft. It’s designed to identify …
The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School is hosting a free Virtual Symposium on Citation and the Law on April 22 and 23, 2021. Registration is now open. The symposium will highlight the scholarship of law librarians and faculty interested in issues ranging from the US News and World Reports rankings for scholarly …
For the last few years, I’ve been following the issue of legal citation metrics and scholarly impact and visibility very closely. I’m pleased to share that my new paper entitled, Representing Law Faculty Scholarly Impact: Strategies for Improving Citation Metrics and Promoting Scholarly Visibility is now available via SSRN. I will be presenting the paper …