Two new journals from bepress have been added to the list of legal periodicals at law.wlu.edu/library/research/lawrevs/mostcited.asp:
International Commentary on Evidence (2004- )[online](began with bepress 2004- but does have some articles from 1998-)
Muslim World Journal of Human Rights (2004- )[online]
I've done some work on improving the openURL server at http://law.wlu.edu/library/resolver.asp. You can enter a journal name and find what databases are likely to hold full-text. Entering just the journal name will usually retrieve a link to the journal and the site level of the online supplier. If you also include what you know of volume, issue, page, year, or article title then you may get links to various levels such as article, issue, or volume. Publishers have differing requirements, so e.g. Oxford University Press requires volume, issue and either the page or the article title, whereas other publishers may be happy with just volume and page. Article level links are available into Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline.
Some blogs during October have discussed Judge Posner's article, Against the Law Reviews: Welcome to the World Where Inexperienced Editors Make Articles About the Wrong Topics Worse, 2004 (Dec) Legal Aff. 57. See Larry E. Ribstein, Micah Schwartzman, and Brian Leiter
Lots of interesting points made, though probably none that haven't been made many times before, given the extensive literature over many years that criticizes the institution of student-edited law journals. One thing that Leiter had to say did spark a thought on the burdens that law reviews place on library staff. Leiter says that one of the real purposes of student-edited law reviews is to "provide slave labor to law professors too lazy to properly cite-check and document their articles". One might add that the law library staff has an ancillary, and costly, role in abetting that process. Has any library ever presented their law review with a bill for the reference and interlibrary-loan costs of cite-checking? Still if author-from-X-law-school published with journal-from-Y-law-school, and then author-from-Y-law-school published with journal-from-X-law-school, maybe the costs balance out, but they're still real for law school libraries. Much of the costs, of course, are grounded in the non-economic decisions made by The Bluebook editors. When Bluebook changes were made that allowed law reviews to cite newspaper articles to at least Lexis and Westlaw, that was a boon for cost and efficiency. But the Bluebook emphasis is still solidly into pretending that authors looked at a paper copy when we know they mostly didn't. How often have ILL departments been asked for cite-checking purposes for the like of, the hard copy of an article that appeared on the website of PCWorld.com, or the hard copy of a statistical table at the Health & Human Services site? This emphasis on supplying physical copies of material the author didn't use is quite costly. A little more honesty to the source used by the author would be appreciated by author, editor, and library. Generally, more choice for authors would be a virtue. For those authors who think they've done a good job on their own editing, legal periodicals should give them a no-editing fast-track to publication. Or for those authors who want peer-review, send their article out for peer-review. There are no general law school law reviews that are refereed. In the realm of the specialized legal journal perhaps there are about 30 peer edited and about another 30 refereed journals that are associated with law schools. Some authors (particularly non-U.S., or social-science authors, or those publishing as a result of grants) might be attracted to a law review that offered them an option of having their article refereed. With over 700 U.S. legal journals competing for articles, it's certainly an advantage to authors of the present publishing system that anyone can get published somewhere. Law journals might want to gain a little competitive advantange by thinking of a cafeteria of offerings to authors.
Three new journals (all published or distributed by Cambridge University Press) have been added to the list of legal periodicals at law.wlu.edu/library/research/lawrevs/mostcited.asp:
European Constitutional Law Review (2005- )
Health Economics, Policy and Law (2006- )
International Journal of Law in Context (2005- )
None of the legal periodical indexes are comprehensive, but I do wonder why it's necessary to be deliberately non-comprehensive. I'm referring to the situation when Index to Legal Periodicals decides to add a new journal. Take the example of Albany Law Journal of Science & Technology, coverage is:
Index to Legal Periodicals: v9 (1999)-
Legal Resource Index: v1 (1991)-
Westlaw (complete full-text): v2 (1992)-
Lexis (complete full-text): v4 (1994)-
When ILP added the journal it chose not to index vols 1-8, which can certainly be understood in terms of the printed volumes, but when (I'd hazard) the majority of searches in ILP are done online it makes poor sense not to go to the trouble of back-indexing. Surely if vol. 9 is of value, then vol. 8 is too. ILP just shows up as being much the least adequate in coverage. Creating a more comprehensive database version than print version also offers H.W. Wilson the possibility of recompiling the print source and re-selling it to law libraries!
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 |
Westlaw is lightening fast in making U.S. law reviews available online (Lexis is probably much the same, though I didn't test it). Generally, Westlaw copy is faster than library hardcopy availability. I checked the U.S. law reviews that were added to Westlaw on a random day, October 21, 2004, and looked at the check-in records for those issues at three law libraries (Berkeley, Texas, Georgetown). Out of the nine law review issues added to Westlaw on 10/21/04 one issue (109 Penn. St. L. Rev. #1) was available in libraries beforehand, being Berkeley and Texas on the 13th and Georgtown on the 18th; two issues (46 Ariz. L. Rev. #3 and 19 Tul. Euro. Civ. L.F.) were available in libraries on the same day as Westlaw availability, and for the remaining six issues Westlaw beat the fastest of the library copies by an average of 8 days. As an aside, the check-in dates showed a fairly consistent pattern in making the issues available, with Texas being the fastest and Georgetown the slowest, often up to a week later. Perhaps libraries should be checking their comparative check-in dates to see if they have systematic problems with mail delivery or processing.
I've been thinking of changing the formula under which the impact factor is calculated for the most-cited list of legal periodicals. Comments welcome if anyone has an opinion. From the vantage point of November 2004 (when I do the 1997-2004 calculations) I cannot determine the number of articles published in each journal, simply because not all of the 2004 articles have been indexed or included in full-text databases as yet. I can only reasonably accurately count articles through the end of 2003, yet the recorded number of citations to each journal includes cites to 2004 volumes, as cited up through October 31st. 2004. So an impact factor calculation of, (cites to 1997-2004 articles)/(number of 1997-2003 articles published by the journal), doesn't quite mesh. So a few articles are added to the denominator by adding 10/12th of the average number of articles published in the previous 7 years. There's a reasonable argument though, for not bothering with the formula adjustment because the impact factor of the current year's volume is very slight. For example, looking at Columbia Law Review (from the vantage of Nov 1, 2004) the impact factors of each volume are as follows (with the number of 2004 Columb. L. Rev. articles estimated):
Year Cites Articles Impact-factor
1997 1252 62 20.2
1998 1090 38 28.7
1999 983 51 19.3
2000 910 54 16.9
2001 588 54 10.9
2002 461 67 6.9
2003 257 52 4.9
2004 39 43 0.9
Because the 2004 volume has had so little time in which to accumulate citations its impact factor is very small. It would be expected that the oldest volume in the cycle would have the highest impact factor, as the article count accumulates each year. It would be feasible to come up with an average expected increase in impact factor and thus to declare a deviating volume good or bad (in this case plainly either 1997 was a bad year, or 1998 was a good one, citation-wise), not sure who'd be interested in that though, other than the then editorial board. Anyway, the 39 cites to 2004 articles represents less than 1% of the total cites to 1997-2004, and calcuating the impact factor simply by (1997-2004 cites)/(1997-2003 articles) seems reasonable.
I've come upon law review issues before that have failed to be indexed by Index to Legal Periodicals but I've just noticed that no issues from vol 50 (1998) of Florida Law Review are indexed, either online in ILP or in the paper ILP. Seems rather a shame for the editors and authors who labored to create that law review volume. I've noticed issues before that didn't get indexed in Legal Resource Index, so it's not perfect either. This does present a problem when I rely on article counts from ILP to calculate a journal's impact-factor. When I have doubts about the count of articles for a particular year I'll try to double-check from some other index or full-text source but I must admit that incomplete indexing data is a methodological issue with calculating impact factors
The most-cited list of legal periodicals has been updated for 1997-2004. See, law.wlu.edu/library/research/lawrevs/mostcited.asp. Most of the impact factor data has not been updated as yet for 1997-2004, and entries that have may be volatile until most article counts have been updated.
Among the U.S. general law reviews, the top-5 ranked in the same citation-count order this year as they did last year:
1 Harvard Law Review
2 Yale Law Journal
3 Columbia Law Review
4 Stanford Law Review
5 Michigan Law Review
NYU Law Rev. and Va. L. Rev. both had large citation increases jumping NYU to 6th and Va. to 10th and dropping Tex. L. Rev off the top-10. The rankings give figures for 1995-2002, 1996-2003, and 1997-2004, but it's hard to know what fluctuations between these years mean. The largest componant is likely to be the oldest volume in each 8 year cycle (because that volume has had the longest time to accumulated citations), and perhaps changes in citation counts reflect that volume being unusually good/bad, or perhaps the citation-count changes are a trend for the journal.
The most-cited rank order listing depends on Westlaw searches in the JLR database looking for citation abbreviations. I've just noticed an issue in Westlaw, which I expect not to be a serious problem, but is rather interesting. It relates to priority of connectors and set results when doing a search with a sequence of "+3" connectors (or higher).
It can be seen best with a simple JLR search like:
5 +1 J +3 L +3 MED = 3 articles one of which is a bad hit with "MED" before "L"
5 +1 (J +3 L) +3 MED = same result
5 +1 J +3 (L +3 MED) = 2 articles
Due to the processing of result sets from left to right "J +3 L" is processed before "MED" and then when "MED" is processed it can follow either "J" OR "L" within 3 words and can thus retrieve a document containing "J. of Med. & L" which is quite counter-intuitive, and not at all what's wanted in this particular search.
Looking at another search in Lexis (U.S. & Canadian Law Reviews), and in Westlaw(JLR):
LX: ONE +3 FIT +3 SIZE = 9
WL: ONE +3 FIT +3 SIZE = 2735
It can be seen that Lexis does a search where each word precedes the next, but Westlaw is returning results on "one size fits all" which to my way of thinking is incorrect.
I thought it might be interesting to see if libraries as a whole purchase law reviews rationally, based on citation counts (price might be relevant but I didn't consider that). I've listed below two categories of law reviews, those with impact factors >= 10 and those much lower in the prestige scale with an impact factor of 2. The final number after each law review name is the number of libraries attached to WorldCat records for that journal (regardless of format). If the title changed recently I used whichever library count was higher. So the lines show:
Name Impact-factor-score Citation-count Library-count.
Among the high-impact group there is a very high correlation of 0.933 between citation count and numbers of holding libraries. Among the low-impact group the correlation is much lower (0.579). This perhaps indicates that decisions to purchase/catalog high-impact law reviews are based on fairly accurate assessments of comparative citation counts but that low-impact journals may be acquired for other, or perhaps erratic, reasons.
Impact Factor >= 10
Cornell Law Review 11.4 3129 586
The Yale Law Journal 11.3 5552 1050
Columbia Law Review 11.2 4654 878
Stanford Law Review 10.9 4286 652
New York University Law Review 10.8 3553 820
Virginia Law Review 10.7 3379 667
Harvard Law Review 10.2 6520 1525
Northwestern University Law Review 10.1 2487 514
California Law Review 10 3392 632
Impact Factor = 2
Idaho Law Review 2 370 281
New Mexico Law Review 2 374 263
Nova Law Review 2 353 261
Pace Law Review 2 269 260
Penn State Law Review 2 448 336
Regent University Law Review 2 247 177
Saint Louis University Law Journal 2 944 309
Tulsa Law Review 2 638 274
UMKC Law Review 2 572 286
Vermont Law Review 2 469 260
Widener Law Review 2 289 149
Wyoming Law Review 2 373 208