Citations, Justifications, and the Troubled State of Legal Scholarship

Recent pedagogical, economic, and technological changes require law schools to reevaluate their resource allocations. Although typically viewed in terms of curricular changes, it is important also to focus on the very significant investment in legal scholarship and its impact. Typically, this has been determined by some version of citation counting with little regard for what it means to be cited. This Article discusses why this is a deeply flawed measure of impact. Much of that discussion is based on an empirical study the Authors conducted. The investigation found that citation by other authors is highly influenced by the rank of the review in which a work is published and the school from which the author graduated. Courts, on the other hand, are less sensitive to these markers of institutional authority. Perhaps more importantly, when the purpose of the citation is examined, a very small handful of those citing a work do so for anything related to the ideas, reasoning, methodology, or conclusions found in the cited work. This is slightly less true for judicial citation compared to citations by other authors. Given the level of current investment in legal scholarship and findings that reliance on it is far lower than citation counts would suggest, the Authors offer a number of recommendations designed to increase accountability of legal scholars and the utility of what they produce.

The impact of scientific journals of communication: Comparing Google Scholar Metrics, Web of Science and Scopus

Google Scholar Metrics' launch in April 2012, a new bibliometric tool for the evaluation of scientific journals by means of citation counting, has ended with the duopoly exerted by the Web of Science and Scopus databases. This paper aims at comparing the coverage of these three databases and the similarity their journal rankings may have. We selected a sample of journals from the field of Communication Studies indexed in the three databases. Data was recollected on 1720 November, 2012. 277 journals were identified to which we calculated their hindex and ranked them according to such indicator. Then, we analyzed the correlation between the rankings generated. Google Scholar Metrics dobles the coverage of the other databases, reducing the bias toward English language both; web of Science and Scopus have. Google Scholar Metrics shows higher hindex values (an average 47% higher than Scopus and 40% higher than Web of Science), allowing to better rank journals. We conclude that Google Scholar Metrics is a tool capable of identifying the main journals in Communication Studies offering results as reliable and valid as the ones Web of Science and Scopus show. La aparición de Google Scholar Metrics en abril de 2012 como nuevo sistema de evaluación bibliométrica de revistas científicas a partir del recuento de las citas bibliográficas que éstas han recibido en Google Scholar rompe el duopolio ejercido hasta el momento por las bases de datos Web of Science y Scopus. El objetivo de este trabajo es comparar la cobertura que poseen estas tres bases de datos y la similitud que puedan presentar los rankings elaborados a partir de ellas. Se ha elegido como muestra las revistas de comunicación indizadas en las tres bases de datos. Las búsquedas bibliográficas se efectuaron entre el 17 y el 20 de noviembre de 2012. Se calcula el índice h de las 277 revistas identificadas y se averigua la correlación existente entre los rankings generados. Google Scholar Metrics duplica la cobertura, reduce el sesgo anglosajón que poseen Web of Science y Scopus. Google Scholar Metrics proporciona índices h más elevados (un promedio de un 47% superior a Scopus y un 40% a Web of Science) con lo que permite discriminar mejor las posiciones de las revistas en el ranking. En conclusión, Google Scholar Metrics es una herramienta capaz de identificar las principales revistas de comunicación ofreciendo resultados tan solventes, fiables y válidos como los generados por Web of Science y Scopus.