Cited by 100scientometrics and bibliometrics researchPublishing and Scholarly CommunicationAcademic Writing and Publishing

Determinants of Citations to Articles in Elite Law Reviews

Open access
Ayres, Ian, Vars, Fredrick E.·2000·The Journal of Legal Studies

Abstract

Studies of citations to law review articles tend to suffer from two related shortcomings: (1) a failure to adjust raw citation counts for opportunities to be cited; and (2) an exclusive focus on the most-cited articles. This article addresses both of these shortcomings for pieces published from 1980 to 1995 in Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. First, we rank articles by citations in other law reviews using regression analysis to correct for time since publication, journal, and subject area. Next, we examine the flow of citations over time and the determinants of citations more generally. To summarize a few of our results: citations per year peak at four years after publication and an article receives half of its expected total life-time citations after 4.6 years; appearing first in an issue is a significant advantage; international law articles receive fewer citations; jurisprudence articles are cited more often; articles by young, female, or minority authors are more heavily cited. Articles with shorter titles, fewer footnotes per page, and without equations have significantly more citations than other articles. Total citations generally increase with an article?s length, but citations per published page peak at 53 pages. Finally, we note a pervasive identification problem in inferring a cause for these our results. Among the possible explanations for observing a positive correlation between a characteristic and citations are: higher quality for this type of article, editorial bias against this type of article (that is, a higher quality cut-off for acceptance), or bias in favor of citation by citing authors. Given this problem (and others), we counsel caution in ascribing meaning to our results.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/468081

Cites

6 of 6 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The order in which an article is listed in a journal issue matters considerably for the influence that the article gathers; the first article in a scientific journal tends to produce more citations than later ones.

    “there is some evidence that the order in which an article is listed in a journal issue matters considerably for the influence that the article gathers. More precisely, the first article in a scientific journal tends to produce more citations than later ones”

    From What do citation counts measure? A review of studies on citing behavior (2008) · cites this paper as Ayres and Vars, 2000

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Authors
Ayres, I., & Vars, F. E.
Affiliations
Yale University (US)
Venue
The Journal of Legal Studies
Published
2000-01
Volume
29
Issue
S1
Pages
427-450
ISSN
  • 0047-2530 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5366
OpenAlex
W3122924405
Cited by
100
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 2
FWCI
1.28
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • The Journal of Legal Studies (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (acceptedVersion)
  • bepress Legal Repository (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
Keywords
Harvard Law Review, citation impact, article length, author gender, legal theory, footnotes

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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