Julian Nyarko (Stanford; Google Scholar) & David Pozen (Columbia), Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law:
A growing body of research has explored the impact of social media activity on citation counts in the natural and social sciences. Using a novel dataset on Twitter activity by U.S. law professors as well as a novel corpus of law journal articles, we extend this research to legal scholarship. We find that joining Twitter increases citation counts by an average of 22% per year and improves article placements by up to 10 ranks for law professors, relative to a synthetic control group.
These positive returns apply across nearly all classes of scholars and are magnified for those who post frequently about their own work. The identified citation boost would be even larger than 22% if it were not partially offset by a decline in citations to articles published pre-Twitter. Overall, our results suggest that social media participation yields concrete benefits in the legal academy — indeed, benefits outstripping those that prior studies have identified in other disciplines — along with a number of potential downsides. …
[T]he abnormally large Twitter bump that we detect in law deserves further inquiry. The discrepancy is not driven by differences in citation rates across disciplines, because we benchmark our results against typical citation rates within the field. Two hypotheses strike us as particularly plausible. First, legal scholarship’s relative lack of “scientific rigor” (Posner [The Bluebook Blues] 2011, p. 860) and “widely shared standards of quality” (West & Citron [On Legal Scholarship] 2014, p. 2; see also Snell [Making the Implicit Quality Standards and Performance Expectations for Traditional Legal Scholarship Explicit] 2019) might make it more susceptible to social media influence, as compared to disciplines in which citation practices are dictated to a greater extent by consensus professional norms. Twitter’s effect on citations, that is, may be larger in fields where authors enjoy greater discretion regarding whom and what to cite. Second, the endlessly debated role of current students in running most law journals (Cotton [The Competence of Students as Editors of Law Reviews: A Response to Judge Posner] 2006; Friedman [Fixing Law Reviews] 2018; Lindgren [An Author's Manifesto] 1994; Wise et al. [Do Law Reviews Need Reform? A Survey of Law Professors, Students Editors, Attorneys, and Judges 2013) might increase the impact of Twitter, insofar as student editors tend to be more attentive to social media cues when deciding which pieces to accept for publication. The phenomenon of law professors pitching new articles to student editors through Twitter reflects and reinforces this possibility.
(Hat Tip: Brian Leiter)
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