Citations to Blogs
posted by Daniel Solove
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr searched Westlaw’s JLR database and discovered that citations to Volokh Conspiracy posts were increasing:
By year: 2004, 14 citations. 2005, 22 citations. 2006, 69 citations. 2007, 43 citations. Note that the high number of citations in 2006 resulted in part from the publication of papers from conferences about law blogs, and that the number of citations for 2007 will likely increase in the future because not all journals have posted their final 2007 issues to the database.
At Balkinization, Jack Balkin found similar results:
In 2003 we received 1 cite; in 2004 3 cites; in 2005 14 cites; in 2006 36 cites; and in 2007 49 cites. . . .
These results suggest that blogging has become a more widespread and accepted practice in the legal academy. It’s important to remember that people cite for many different reasons: to give credit for ideas, to criticize ideas, and as (persuasive) authority. My guess is that most of these citations fall into the first two categories, but that is true to many citations for law review articles as well.
I’m hoping that some enterprising scholar will do a study of citation practices to a selection of 20 or so well known legal blogs to see if the citation patterns for these two blogs reflect a general trend.
I did a search for Concurring Opinions posts in Westlaw’s JLR database. The result: 264 cites in 2007! But, alas, that was searching for “concurring opinions.” I then did the search the proper way, searching for www.concurringopinions.com OR concurringopinions.com and got the following results:
2007 – 28 citations
2006 – 17 citations
2005 – 0 citations
Our blog was started in October 2005, so that’s why there were no 2005 citations.
February 1, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Posted in: Blogging
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