How do ideological factors explain the citation patterns of federal courts? Current literature uses citation data in myriad ways but leaves open the question of how ideological factors may influence citation from each level of the judicial hierarchy differently. Combining original data on citations to Supreme Court opinions by district courts from 1969 to 2005 with existing data on citations by the courts of appeals and Supreme Court, I present a more complete portrait of the scope of a precedent across the federal judiciary. I find that ideological factors are associated with differences in citing behavior on the federal courts. Both the appellate and district courts are responsive to Supreme Court precedent, but district courts are not equally responsive to liberal and conservative updates to doctrine. Further, as the Supreme Court ideology changes from the time of setting precedent, appellate courts are less likely to cite the precedent, but district courts cite it more. These results suggest that the relationship between ideology and precedent adherence is complicated by the distinct institutional features of the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts.

This article examines the authority of the 2005 International Committee of the Red Cross Study on Customary international humanitarian law within the international legal system by collecting and analysing citations to the Study in documents containing expressions of State positions, in the judgments of international and domestic courts and tribunals and in the outputs of other influential actors. Our analysis establishes that the Study is increasingly seen as a highly authoritative instrument, such that a particular proposition will be found to reflect customary international law simply on the basis that the Study says so. We argue that the Study's authority will likely only increase over time.

Most scientific publications have their metadata available as freely accessible and machine-readable information at CrossRef. However, student-edited law reviews have not followed suit with this practice. Consequently, a large part of legal research remains in a blind spot for scientometric analyses and tools. The present paper, by Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, investigates whether the law reviews’ RSS feeds could serve as equivalent sources for open scholarly metadata. The suitability of RSS feeds from 51 student-edited law reviews (as indexed in Web of Science's Social Science Citation Index) was assessed with regards to three fictitious meta-scientific applications – namely (1) a ‘latest paper’-tool that lists the law reviews’ newest publications with links, abstracts and dates, (2) an author database and (3) a calculation of the mutual citation counts among different law reviews. This paper finds that only 21 law reviews offer functional RSS feeds, and while they were suitable for a basic ‘latest papers’-tool, due to their low metadata quality they cannot aid in generating an author database or in counting the mutual citations among law reviews. The result suggests that law reviews would be advised to adopt digital object identifiers (DOIs) and start depositing openly accessible metadata, for otherwise their scholarly impact and visibility will further decline.

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

This Article studies the change in behavior over time for the professional actors in the international investment arbitration system. Using the results from a large-scale computational analysis, I find indications that the actors have increased their use of citations and their use of terms that originate outside of the litigated treaties. In light of these findings, I argue that the actors are increasingly challenging the insulated structural outset of international investment law with a more systemic approach to legal reasoning. Subsequently, I explore if theories from the realm of cognitive science may provide explanations for why the actors are changing their behavior and what consequences such cognitive mechanisms may have on the systems development.

Getting an article published in a scientific journal requires skills that are rarely taught, but are almost invariably learned by (bitter) experience. Yet, there are generally applicable guidelines that facilitate the process. This article summarises them.

The significance and influence of U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions derive in large part from opinions’ roles as precedents for future opinions. A growing body of literature seeks to understand what drives the use of opinions as precedents through the study of Supreme Court case citation patterns. We raise two limitations of existing work on Supreme Court citations. First, dyadic citations are typically aggregated to the case level before they are analyzed. Second, citations are treated as if they arise independently. We present a methodology for studying citations between Supreme Court opinions at the dyadic level, as a network, that overcomes these limitations. This methodology—the citation exponential random graph model, for which we provide user-friendly software—enables researchers to account for the effects of case characteristics and complex forms of network dependence in citation formation. We then analyze a network that includes all Supreme Court cases decided between 1950 and 2015. We find evidence for dependence processes, including reciprocity, transitivity, and popularity. The dependence effects are as substantively and statistically significant as the effects of exogenous covariates, indicating that models of Supreme Court citations should incorporate both the effects of case characteristics and the structure of past citations.

Prestigious journals are widely admired for publishing quality scholarship, yet the primary indicators of journal prestige (i.e., impact factors) do not directly assess audience admiration. Moreover, the publication landscape has changed substantially in the last 20 years, with electronic publishing changing the way we consume scientific research. Given that it has been 18 years since the publication of the last journal prestige survey of SIOP members, the authors conducted a new survey and used these results to reflect on changing practices within industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. SIOP members (n = 557) rated the prestige and relevance of I-O and management journals. Responses were analyzed according to job setting, and were compared to a survey conducted by Zickar and Highhouse (2001) in 2000. There was considerable consistency in prestige ratings across settings (i.e., management department vs. psychology department; academic vs. applied), especially among the top journals. There was considerable variance, however, in the perceived usefulness of different journals. Results also suggested considerable consistency across the two time periods, but with some increases in prestige among OB-oriented journals. Changes in the journal landscape are discussed, including the rise of OHP as a topic of concentration in I-O. We suggest that I-O programs will continue to attract the top researchers in talent management and OHP, which should result in the use of a broader set of journals for judging I-O program impact.

We analyzed the publication productivity supported by the Puerto Rico Consortium for Clinical and Translational Research (PRCTRC) using the structured process of scientometrics. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of the research and collaborations as presented in publications. Manuscripts published from 2010 to 2018 and that had the PRCTRC award number and a PMCID number were retrieved from the Science Citation Index database. Scientometric indicators included h-index (HI), average citation (AC), collaboration coefficient (CC), collaboration index (CI), and degree of collaboration (DC) analysis, and relative citation ratio (RCR) was done with Web of Science Platform, iCite, and Stata software. Joinpoint Trend Analysis Software was used to calculate the annual percent change (APC). From 2010 to 2018, 341 publications were identified with an average of 38 publications per year and a total of 3569 citations excluding self-citations. A significant growth (APC: 17.76%, P < 0.05) of scientific production was observed. The overall HI was 31, and the AC per item was 11.04. The overall CC was 0.82, the CI was 8.59, and the DC was 99.1%. This study demonstrates a statistically significant increase in the PRCTRC scientific production. Results allow for the assessment of the progress resulting from the provided support and to plan further strategies accordingly.

This paper argues that the economics discipline is highly concentrated, which may inhibit scientific innovation and change in the future. The argument is based on an empirical investigation of six dimensions of concentration in economics between 1956 and 2016 using a large-scale data set. The results show that North America accounts for nearly half of all articles and three quarters of all citations. Twenty institutions reap a share of 42 percent of citations, five journals a share of 28.5 percent, and 100 authors a share of 15.5 percent. A total of 2.8 percent of citations may be attributed to heterodox schools of thought. Also top articles are concentrated along these dimensions. Overall, concentration has strongly increased over the last six decades.

In this comment on Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell’s article “Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields,” I explore the role of changes in the disparities of citations to work written by women over time. Breaking down their citation data by era, I find that some of the patterns in citations are the result of the legacy of disparity in the field. Citations to more recent work come closer to matching the distribution of the gender of authors of published work. Although the need for more equitable practices of citation remains, the overall patterns are not quite as bad as Dion, Sumner, and Mitchell conclude.

Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across political science subfields and across methodological subfields within political science, sociology, and economics. The research design captures variance across research areas in terms of the underlying distribution of female scholars. We expect that subfields within political science and social science disciplines with more women will have smaller gender citation gaps, a reduction of the “Matthew effect” where men’s research is viewed as the most central and important in a field. However, gender citation gaps may persist if a “Matilda effect” occurs whereby women’s research is viewed as less important or their ideas are attributed to male scholars, even as a field becomes more diverse. Analysing all articles published from 2007–2016 in several journals, we find that female scholars are significantly more likely than mixed gender or male author teams to cite research by their female peers, but that these citation rates vary depending on the overall distribution of women in their field. More gender diverse subfields and disciplines produce smaller gender citation gaps, consistent with a reduction in the “Matthew effect”. However, we also observe undercitation of work by women, even in journals that publish mostly female authors. While improvements in gender diversity in academia increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by women, implicit biases in citation practices in the social sciences persist.

This article portrays the use of consensus claims, as well as their substantiation, in the debate on cyber-attacks and Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Focusing on (re)interpretations of the prohibition on the use of force in the light of cyber-attacks, the article first shows how scholars appeal to the ‘majority opinion’ of scholars or the ‘generally accepted’ interpretation of the norm. It points out the different uses of these ‘consensus claims’, as I refer to them, and what scholars invoke exactly when referring to this elusive majority. Elaborating on this ‘elusive’ nature of consensus, I argue that the appeal of a consensus claim lies precisely in its invocation of a fairly mystical ‘out there’. Consensus, as it turns out, evaporates the moment we attempt to substantiate it, and this might be precisely where its strength lies. The second part of the article thus shifts focus to how these claims are substantiated. An empirical inquiry into the footnotes supporting consensus claims reveals that, most of the time, writers refer to the same scholars to substantiate their claims. Making use of Henry Small's idea of ‘concept symbols’, the article argues that these most-cited scholars turn into the ‘bearers’ of majority opinion. On the level of the individual academic piece, the singular reference might appear to be fairly innocent. Yet, when considered as a more widespread practice of ‘self-referentiality’, it seriously impacts who gets a say – and thus, ultimately, what we know – in international law.