Download This PaperCitation Databases for Legal Scholarship
39 Legal Reference Services Quarterly 56 (2020)
University at Buffalo School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2019-014
55 Pages Posted: 20 Apr 2020
Date Written: February 26, 2020
Abstract
Traditional citation sources, such as Web of Science, index limited numbers of law journals. Consequently, although not designed for generating scholarship citation metrics, many law scholarship citation studies use law-specific databases like Westlaw or LexisNexis to gather citations. This article compares citation metrics derived from Web of Science and Westlaw to metrics derived from Google Scholar and HeinOnline’s citation tools. The study finds that HeinOnline and Westlaw generate higher metrics than Web of Science, and Google Scholar generates higher metrics than both. However, metrics from all four sources are highly correlated, so rankings generated from any may be very similar.
Keywords: citation databases, rankings, citation analysis, research metrics, bibliometrics, unique citations, citation overlap, h-index
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
John R. Beatty (Contact Author)
University at Buffalo Law School ( email )
School of Law
528 O'Brian Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
United States
(716) 645-8590 (Phone)