Are symposium issues, or non-symposium issues, cited the most often in any particular law review? Seems like an interesting question for law review editors who might wish their law review to rise in the citation ranks. My immediate thought was that the impact factor of a symposium issue would be lower than average, but the sample that I looked at doesn't show that being true. I looked at a sample of symposium issues in 1997 where the next numbered issue was a non-symposium issue, and counted the article citations in Westlaw's JLR database to those issues. It can be seen below that, except for one journal issue in Minn. L. Rev., the impact factor of symposium issues is higher than for non-symposium issues. This is a very small sample, and for certainty many more issues would need to be added in. There is also a small bias in favor of symposium issues here, as the first published issue has had slightly more time in which to garner citations. Still, it seems likely that the quality of symposium articles (as measured by citations) in any particular journal is higher than non-symposium articles in that same journal.
| Journal/Issue | Citations | Articles | Impact-Factor |
| Minn. L. Rev. v82#2 | 210 | 7 | 30 (symp. issue) |
| Minn. L. Rev. v82#3 | 230 | 5 | 46 |
| Ala. L. Rev. v49#1 | 122 | 13 | 9.4 (symp. issue) |
| Ala. L. Rev. v49#2 | 62 | 9 | 6.9 |
| Wake Forest L. Rev. v32#3 | 124 | 12 | 10.3 (symp. issue) |
| Wake Forest L. Rev. v32#4 | 77 | 9 | 8.6 |
| U. Cin. L. Rev. v66#1 | 145 | 11 | 13.2 (symp. issue) |
| U. Cin. L. Rev. v66#2 | 103 | 10 | 10.3 |
| Okla. L. Rev. v50#3 | 31 | 8 | 3.9 (symp. issue) |
| Okla. L. Rev. v50#4 | 23 | 6 | 3.8 |