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28 June 2007

Law Scholarship Statistics

The Empirical Legal Studies blog has interesting information about law review article authorship:

[T]here are 314,331 unique authors in the ILP database. . . . There are approximately 750,000 articles with one or more named authors. The average output per author is 2.45 articles. . . the Top 1000 authors account for 9.1% of the entries (70,452). In other words, 1/3 of 1% of the authors produced 9.1% of the entries.


Thus, the average top 1000 law review article author has 70 published articles, and 3 published articles is enough to put you in the above average category for legal scholarship. The source of the data and methodology and its limitations are discussed in the linked post.

Other studies note that:

The top 0.5% of articles get 18% of all citations; the top 5.2% of articles get 50% of all citations; and the top 17% of articles get 79% of all citations. . . . 40% of articles are never cited at all.


SSRN downloads of articles are far less skewed towards the big names.

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