Shapiro and Pearse on The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time

Fred R. Shapiro of the Yale Law School Library and Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library have published The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review, 110, 1483-1520 (2012). Here is the abstract:

This Essay updates two well-known earlier studies (dated 1985 and 1996) by the first coauthor, setting forth lists of the most-cited law review articles. New research tools from the HeinOnline and Web of Science databases now allow lists to be compiled that are more thorough and more accurate than anything previously possible. Tables printed here present the 100 most-cited legal articles of all time, the 100 most-cited articles of the last twenty years, and some additional rankings. Characteristics of the top-ranked publications, authors, and law schools are analyzed as are trends in schools of legal thought. Data from the all-time rankings shed light on contributions to legal scholarship made over a long historical span; the recent-article rankings speak more to the impact of scholarship produced in the current era. The authors discuss alternative tools and metrics for measuring the impact of legal scholarship, running selected articles from the rankings through these tools to serve as points of illustration. The authors then contemplate how these alternative tools and metrics intersect with traditional citation studies and how they might impact legal scholarship in the future.

Pearse and Keele on How Librarians Can Help Improve Law Journal Publishing

Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library and Benjamin Keele of the William and Mary Wolf Law Library, have posted How Librarians Can Help Improve Law Journal Publishing, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Librarians are well-positioned to improve law journal publishing and help it evolve in the ever-changing digital environment. They can provide student editors with advice on a variety of issues such as copyright, data, preservation, and version control. Librarians can also help journals adopt technical standards and improve the discoverability and usability of journal content. While few libraries can adopt all these suggestions, a checklist of ideas is provided to help librarians select those that are most suitable to their libraries and journals.

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New on VoxPopuLII: Pearse on an Ontology for Legal Scholarship

Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library has posted Is it Time for Law Libraries to Collaborate on Description for Their Own Institutions’ Legal Scholarship?, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Pearse argues that law librarians should cooperate to create an ontology of legal concepts, to be used by law reviews to describe the articles they publish. Ms. Pearse endorses a model of ontology development described by Dr. Núria Casellas and Dr. Adam Wyner. Accordingly, Ms. Pearse proposes that the ontology would be developed collaboratively by legal subject specialists, including law professors, other legal scholars, and law librarians.

According to Ms. Pearse, the proposed ontology would be made available in open, interoperable formats. This would allow the ontology to link to other ontologies — thereby contributing to the development of the legal Semantic Web — and would facilitate use of the ontology by a range of software and users, and in connection with a variety of systems and data. By providing high quality metadata in open, interoperable formats, the ontology would further the objectives of the open access law journal and open legal educational resources movements.

Ms. Pearse argues that application of such an ontology to law review articles would provide an additional way for law librarians to participate in the law review publishing process. She sees this as a natural next step for law librarians, given their expertise in legal metadata, and the fact that librarians already participate in other stages of the law journal information lifecycle, including providing support for article preemption, research, and cite checking, and the archiving of law review articles in institutional or scholarly repositories.

In her post, Ms. Pearse also addresses many of the questions likely to be raised concerning such an ontology, including questions respecting project organization, ongoing revision and maintenance, staffing, workflow, and software tools.

This post should be of interest to the legal publishing community, especially editors and publishers of law journals; law librarians; legal scholars; and legal technologists involved with Semantic Web development.

Pearse & Shear on the Massachusetts Inventory of Legal Materials

Video is available of the presentation about the Massachusetts Inventory of Legal Materials given by Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library, and Joan Shear of the Boston College Law Library, on 17 June 2010 as part of the Law.gov Massachusetts Workshop at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

In their presentation, Ms. Pearse and Ms. Shear discuss the current state of public access to legal information in Massachusetts; restrictions on access to that information, including copyright restrictions; and their efforts — as part of the National Inventory of Legal Materials — which is coordinated by Paul Lomio and Erika Wayne, both of the Stanford University Law Library — to create an online inventory of all primary legal materials in Massachusetts.

The presentation addresses a number of issues of interest to those who develop legal information systems or who are involved in efforts to increase online access to legal information.