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Scholarly Impact: Guide

Resources for tracking scholarly impact metrics

Measuring the impact of legal scholarship through quantitative metrics is getting a push thanks to the interest of US News. This guide seeks to provide guidance in how to find those measures and how to enhance your profile at key sites. 

HeinOnline ScholarCheck

HeinOnline provides computer-generated citation counts for legal scholars, and incorporates that information into its ScholarCheck rankings system. US News intends to rely on HeinOnline data to provide faculty scholarly impact indicators for each law school.

Tracking Scholar or Article Citations on HeinOnline

 Searching for a particular author or article provides quick access to citation data:

  1. Go to the HeinOnline Law Journals Library
  2. Search for an author’s name or journal article. Use the Advanced search page to limit the search to the author/creator field. Please keep in mind alternative spellings or nicknames, and name changes.
  3. Click on the name of the author. 

On this profile page you will see impact factor analytics as well as a list of articles published that are available on Heinonline.

Michael Blumm HeinOnline

Creating Your HeinOnline Author Profile

Having a HeinOnline profile helps ensure that Hein has a more accurate count citation count and allows the scholar to provide enhanced biographical information.

To create your HeinOnline Author Profile fill out an Author Profile Setup Request. Authors may add:

  • Preferred name and name variations
  • Email addresses
  • School affiliation
  • Job title
  • ORCID ID# (see below)
  • Photo
  • Bio
  • Social media information

Google Scholar

Google Scholar Citations is a free tool for tracking citations as well as for marketing the impact of your scholarly citations. Though not included, for now, in US News’ proposed scholarly impact rankings, Google Scholar is a highly visible site for scholarly citation information. 

Finding Google Scholar Citations by Author

  1. Search by author name or article title in the Google Scholar article search, or search by Google Scholar Profile
  2. Click on the author’s name in the article or their Profile

Michael Blumm Google Scholar Profile

Create Your Google Scholar Profile

  1. Sign into Google
  2. Go to Google Scholar Citations
  3. Fill out the Google Citations Sign Up Form. Be sure to use your lclark.edu email address.

SSRN Citations

SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is used by most law faculty to publish, read, and track scholarship. For faculty, SSRN tracks number of papers, downloads, and citations, as well as applying a rank to the latter two measures. 

Finding SSRN Statistics by Author

  1. Search in SSRN by author name or article
  2. Click on the author’s name

Michael Blumm SSRN Author Profile

Managing Your SSRN Profile

After logging into SSRN, use the Personal Info tab to edit your contact information, add a photo, add an ORCID ID#, and control what rankings will appear.

Use the My Papers tab to manage the visibility of your work.

ORCID ID

ORCID IDs are persistent digital identifies that distinguish each researcher from every other researcher and, it is hoped, will provide for automated linkages between a scholar’s professional activities. ORCID is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations.

HeinOnline and Google Scholar allow for the inclusion of ORCID IDs in their respective author profiles.

Create Your ORCID Identifier

  1. Register at https://orcid.org/register
  2. Once registered, add your professional professional information and other indentifiers
  3. Add your ORCID Identifier to your HeinOnline and Google Scholar author profiles

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