Citation Databases for Legal Scholarship

Authors

John R. Beatty, University at Buffalo School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-19-2020

Rights

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.

DOI

10.1080/0270319X.2020.1738198

Publication Title

Legal Reference Services Quarterly

First Page

56

Last Page

85

Required Text

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Legal Reference Services Quarterly on March 19, 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0270319X.2020.1738198.

Recommended Citation

John R. Beatty, Citation Databases for Legal Scholarship, 39 Legal Ref. Servs. Q. 56 (2020).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/law_librarian_articles/50