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:
Collecting citations and metrics for Law researchers faces a number of specific challenges:
In most cases, therefore, accurate legal citation results require full-text manual searching by publication title, as well as manual searching by author name.
In other disciplines, different databases specialise in providing metrics data about different kinds of publications (e.g. journal article, book, book chapter, etc.).
However, obtaining metrics data in Law is a much more manual exercise (owing to the challenges summarised above).
This means that the same approach - manual searching by title and author - is usually the best option, irrespective of what kind of source you are searching for.
Databases where you are likely to find references to your work (with advice about how to search them) are listed below.
Give careful thought to record-keeping, ideally before you start.
Some things to bear in mind:
Even if you have not used EndNote before, compiling an EndNote library of references that have cited your work can be an excellent resource. Using EndNote, you can:
If you think EndNote could assist you and are not sure where to start, please feel free to contact your Librarian.
Remember that,
For example,
As a Law researcher, you may at various times have to provide evidence of your research impact to audiences or reviewers who are not from a legal background.
Hence it may be helpful, as you compile metric information, to consider how it might be framed numerically to impress a non-legal reader.
e.g. X publication has 10 citations in Google Scholar, 6 of these in journals with an A or A* ranking in the ABDC Journal Quality List (Australia's most authoritative journal ranking index for the Law discipline).
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.
Find out more about Author Profiles.
HeinOnline's author profile pages display lists of authors' work and ScholarRank statistics, which is the database's scholarly impact ranking system.
Access an author profile page with the options listed on HeinOnline's guide.
From an author profile page, users can download a CSV file of an author's scholarly works with citation information.
HeinOnline also integrates with Altmetric Explorer providing journal article metrics on attention from news outlets, websites, blogs and social media.
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.
Go to Google Scholar
Click on 'My Citations'
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
Complete the form (you need to include your university email address for inclusion in Google Scholar search results) and click 'Next Step'
Google scholar will provide you a list of publications which it thinks belong to you:
Click on 'See all Articles' to select individual articles. Scroll through the list and deselect any publications which are not yours
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.
Choose whether you want Google to automatically add new publications to your profile or whether you want to do so manually
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.
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
Your H-Index will appear in the author details to the right of your profile.
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.
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).
Specific journal rankings relevant to the Law discipline are also available at: