With academics increasingly coming under pressure to demonstrate that scholarship has real world impact, citation to government decisions seems informative. I took a few minutes to assemble some statistics on court citation to various journals. If you are not familiar with this resource, Washington & Lee Law Library offers an online tool to assess journals’ impact – both in academic writing and in court citation (i.e. how often has a journal’s articles been cited by a state or federal court). The tool provides information on a wide variety of legal journals and some from other disciplines. I’ve assembled below cumulative number of times various journals that might be familiar to political scientists are cited by state and federal courts from 2003-20011. As might be expected, most of the journals are law oriented. If you’re interested in this sort of information, then you can conduct your own analysis on their website. It even allows you to download your findings into an excel spreadsheet. I do not portray this analysis as being perfect- just my quick take. So, as the picture above suggests – take it all with a grain of salt. For comparison, Harvard Law Review has 2500+ for the time period. Continue reading →
