Metrics for Law researchers
As with many non-STEMM disciplines, research excellence in Law is assessed based on peer review, rather than purely citation analysis.
Even by comparison with other disciplines in the social sciences or humanities, citation numbers in Law are generally low.
Metrics information therefore tends to be developed into specific illustrations or narratives of research impact, rather than "the numbers simply speaking for themselves".
You can find illustrative descriptions of highly-regarded and impactful Law research at the following links:
- ERA Impact Studies for FOR Code 18, Law and Legal Studies
- Impact pages published by the top-rated Australian institutions in the ERA 2018 National Report:
Alert
To work with most of the metrics described in this guide, you will need to update and maintain your author profiles regularly. Author profiles are the foundation for bibliometric analysis.
Check out the Author profiles guide for further information and instructions on how to maintain and update your author profiles.
Practical challenges
Collecting citations and metrics for Law researchers faces a number of specific challenges:
- Full-text indexing, which is essential to collecting citation data, varies significantly from database to database in Law (depending on publisher permissions), more so than in other disciplines.
- Even where full-text indexing is available, legal articles often do not include a bibliography (and use only footnotes for citations). This makes it much more difficult to compile “cited by” totals
- Some legal databases reference journal articles without including the author’s name.
In most cases, therefore, accurate legal citation results require full-text manual searching by publication title, as well as manual searching by author name.
Strategies for Law researchers to manage metrics
Other resources
- University of Melbourne Library guide, Research Impact for Law - a self help guide for academics
- The University of Melbourne guide also includes a bespoke template for collecting Law citations.
- Monash University Library guide, Legal education and research for Law academics: Research impact and publishing
- Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC),Great examples of impactful research by Australia's business schools (scroll down halfway)
- Lyria Bennett Moses and Catherine Renshaw, 'Understanding and Measuring the Impact of Legal Scholarship' (2025) 99(1) Australian Law Journal 26
- The Bibliomagician, "Tracking citations in Law - Guest Post by Quentin Pope"
Journal rankings
The Deakin BusLaw Faculty publishes an agreed ranking of journal and book publisher quality, which contains journal rankings relevant for both the Deakin Business School (DBS) and Deakin Law School (DLS), DBS and DLS Journal Quality Ranking. Be aware that access is given to DBS and DLS members only and users are required to be on Deakin VPN.
There are also these specific journal rankings listed below, relevant to the Law discipline are also available at:
Finding you h-index in Google Scholar
The h-index is the number of publications (h) which have been cited at least (h) times each. For example, a researcher who has an h-index of 10, has at least 10 publications which have each been cited at least 10 times.
For Law researchers, the easiest way to find your H-Index is to create a Google Scholar author profile and include all of your publications.
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Go to Google Scholar
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Click on 'My Citations'
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Login to your personal Google account (or create one if you don't already have one). Google recommends you use a personal account (not your employers account) so you can keep your profile
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Complete the form (you need to include your university email address for inclusion in Google Scholar search results) and click 'Next Step'
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Google scholar will provide you a list of publications which it thinks belong to you:
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Click on 'See all Articles' to select individual articles. Scroll through the list and deselect any publications which are not yours
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If any of your publications are missing, click 'Search articles' to perform a search in Google Scholar to add each of your remaining articles. Click Add to select articles.
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Choose whether you want Google to automatically add new publications to your profile or whether you want to do so manually
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Allowing Google to automatically add new publications can save you time but may erroneously add publications that aren't yours (especially if you have a common name). You also always have the option of manually searching for and adding publications to your profile.
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Review your profile, upload a photo, and go to your university email to click on the verification link. Once you are satisfied with your profile, make it public so it appears in Google Scholar search results
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Your H-Index will appear in the author details to the right of your profile.
Caution
Citations tracked by Google Scholar are not controlled for quality in the same way as Scopus or Web of Science. Metrics from Google Scholar may appear higher and may include errors. However, it can provide better indexing of journal articles and citations in disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, than the traditional citation databases.
Manual citation searching Law databases
Click on the plus (+) icons below for intructions on how to do a manual search in specific law databases.
