The Ginger (Law) Librarian

The winners in the Open, New Member, and Student Divisions will receive $650 , and the Short Form Division winner will receive $300 , all generously donated by LexisNexis. Co-authors of winning papers share awards. Recipients are recognized during award ceremonies at the AALL Annual Meeting and will be given the opportunity to present their papers in a program. See the Call for Papers website !

In spring 2017, I briefly discussed the issues  with scholarship impact factor in law as a response to a recommendation by a law professor to create a rankings methodology based on Google Scholar citation. Now US News is trying to get in the game of creating a ranking of law faculty by scholarship impact factor using Hein publication metrics. US News is asking each law school for the names and other details of its fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. US News plans to link the names of each individual law school's faculty to citations and publications that were published in the previous five years and are available in HeinOnline. Using this data, HeinOnline will compile faculty scholarly impact indicators for each law school . This will include such measures as mean citations per faculty member, median citations per faculty member, and total number of publications. Those measures will then be provided to US News for use in eventually creating a comprehensiv...

We know that law librarians lack status in the status-obsessed legal academy . Some could argue that this is a gender equity problem , with females making up the overwhelming majority of law librarians (another post for another time). But the lack of status also confers a lack of academic freedom to engage in tough conversations. This is particularly difficult for law librarians because we are not protected to fully engage with and advance our field . A field that is wrongly pegged as supplementary or secondary . In the era of big-data algorithms with no accountability and the "fake news" phenomenon, librarians must tackle tough, controversial subjects that affect information. And law librarians take the ethical use of information very seriously with the   ACRL Framework for Information Literacy emphasizing the role of “using information, data, and scholarship ethically” and the AALL Legal Research Competencies and Standards stating that a successful legal resea...

Law Library Journal has accepted my manuscript for 2018 A Legal Research Odyssey: Artificial Intelligence as Disruptor .  The abstract: Cognitive computing is revolutionizing finance through the ability to combine structured and unstructured data and provide precise market analysis. It is also revolutionizing medicine by providing well-informed options for diagnoses. Analogously, ROSS, a progeny of IBM’s Watson, is set to revolutionize the legal field by bringing cognitive computing to legal research. While ROSS is currently being touted as possessing the requisite sophistication to perform effortless legal research, there is a real danger in a technology like ROSS causing premature disruption. As in medicine and finance, cognitive computing has the power to make legal research more efficient. But the technology is not ready to replace the need for law students to learn sound legal research process and strategy. When done properly, legal research is a highly creative skill t...

AALL in Austin is just around the corner. I'm excited to be surrounded by my favorite cohort of humans and feel inspired by all of the wonderful programs!  If you're in Austin, please drop by the Austin Convention Center’s Exhibit Hall 4, Poster #29: You Can't Write Without Research: Developing a Scholarly Research Writing Program at Your Law School.  Safe travels to Austin!

Previously, I discussed the problem with impact factor in law and the seemingly insurmountable task of creating a meaningful impact factor. But as any good law librarian would do, we always try to "make it happen." To that end, I recently ran across PlumX as a platform to aggregate various metric sources. As noted on  Texas Tech University's LibGuide on point , besides traditional citation counts, there are many ways of tracking research impacts. They try to capture the presence in new scholarly venues, presence and impact in social media and other forms of online engagement, such as views, downloads, bookmarks etc. Collectively, we refer to these as altmetrics , as opposed to traditional citation measurement using Web of Science, Scopus and other citation enhanced databases. PlumX  is a subscription-based platform for tracking research impact.  PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate metrics for all types of scholarly research output.  They cat...

While working as a Faculty Services & Scholarly Communications Librarian, I presume I am not alone in being asked to create an impact factor for which to judge the scholarly work of faculty. In fact, Gary Lucas at Texas A&M was recently asked a similar question : Texas A&M University assesses its colleges and departments based partly on scholarly impact and using quantitative metrics. The law school’s dean has assigned me the task of identifying scholarly impact metrics for use in assessing the performance of our law faculty collectively and individually. This essay discusses the major issues that arise in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. It also explains important scholarly impact metrics, including the Leiter score and Google Scholar h-index, and the major sources of information regarding scholarly impact, including Google Scholar, Westlaw, Hein Online, SSRN, and bepress. Ultimately, Lucas proposes ranking scholarship by Google Scholar citation count to p...

After starting a new position, it's always a good idea to evaluate the programming at your new institution and possibly bring experiences and programming initiatives along from your previous institution. At my last institution, I was a reference librarian, and I also taught a full-length course on scholarly writing. When I arrived at my new institution, I noticed a hole in the curriculum when it came to instructing the students on best practices for scholarly writing.  Because many of our students take part in seminar courses or the journal write-on competitions each year, it seemed natural to start a scholarly writing initiative at my new institution.  Starting Fall 2016, two new scholarly writing programs were introduced by the law library. The first was a Scribes Student Legal Writing Society group. As the Executive Director of Scribes, I was tasked with starting local chapters of this group at the various law schools. The first year would be a pilot year wit...

A wonderful colleague who pumps out an admirable amount of scholarship recently turned me onto Scrivener . Scrivener is great for its ability to organize research and act as a word-processing tool. It was originally created for writing novels or screenplays, but more and more law professors are adopting it. The beauty of a tenure-track law librarian position is that it attempts to give law librarians full citizenship in a law school, which as any law librarian knows, is an uphill battle. My law school wasn't ready for it either, so they created a new tenure-track line for "law library faculty." This designation comes with the great responsibility to teach, research, and provide service akin to a "normal" tenure-track law faculty member. It also comes with the responsibility to provide all of the support that a law librarian gives. All of this to say that anything that helps me write more and write faster is a friend of mine. Scrivener has been invaluable f...

In past posts, I have highlighted the importance of a well-optimized article  title and abstract  for discoverability. Titles, in particular, are important because researchers often use keyword searching in the title field to find articles that are highly relevant to their research. Not only is a title important for discoverability, it's also important to catch the attention of a potential reader and up article views and downloads for impact purposes. Brian Leiter over at the Law Professor Blogs Network recently highlighted a story illustrating how to game the article title to increase downloads. I have an article with the (admittedly extremely boring) title "Rethinking Assignor Estoppel" coming out in the Houston Law Review. It has been on SSRN for nine months. I have posted about it twice on Facebook and Twitter, and it has shown up in all the SSRN journals. In that nine months it has garnered 982 views and 172 SSRN downloads. Late Friday afternoon, prompt...

I was completely inspired by reading a post on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog by my friend and colleague, Paul Gatz. The post, in essence, is a reminder that librarianship is its own profession. We need this reminder because we are often relegated to a "supplementary or secondary character" within our institutions. And, to be sure, law librarians do provide the service that is often thought of as supplementary or secondary. As noted: We pride ourselves on the high level and quality of service that we provide to our patrons – performing research, developing collections, and even crafting mission statements based on the needs of our primary institutions, whether law school, firm, or court But we are more than that.  Service is no doubt a necessary function of any library, but that recognition need not commit us to the idea that the library is a secondary or supplementary institution or that service occupies the whole of our professional identity as librarians.  Indeed, at f...

When I teach students about researching for scholarly articles, I mention Congressional Research Services Reports as a gold mine of information. However, my go-to source,  OpenCRS , is no longer active and is only available via archive. But a new organization has stepped in to fill the vast hole left by OpenCRS:  EveryCRSReport.com is now the go-to source for CRS Reports. About EveryCRSReport : CRS is Congress’ think tank, and its reports are relied upon by academics, businesses, judges, policy advocates, students, librarians, journalists, and policymakers for accurate and timely analysis of important policy issues. The reports are not classified and do not contain individualized advice to any specific member of Congress. (More: What is a CRS report?) Until today, CRS reports were generally available only to the well-connected. Now, in partnership with a Republican and Democratic member of Congress, we are making these reports available to everyone for free online. ...

Being on the tenure track is hard for everyone. It's really hard for law librarians because we have so many roles to fill. We often have our administrative library roles, as well as the teaching, research, and service required of faculty. Writing tends to be the thing that gets cast aside as other, more pressing concerns carry the day. For the last few years, I've designed my weeks to write on this blog and a couple of others because I enjoy learning and thinking about the profession. Being required to write full-length law review articles or book chapters has been a good change of pace because it allows me to dig deeper into a topic, but it is much harder to carve out the time and attention necessary to write a full-length piece. Last weekend, I finally submitted a book chapter for publication in a forthcoming book called Millennial Leadership in Libraries . My chapter covers creating a leadership philosophy. I had been working on it since April, and it was a challenging, ...

Earlier this year, Forbes ran a great article on the state of open access in academia. More than any other technology, the web has revolutionized access to the world’s information. While nearly every other form of informational output has been reinvented in some fashion in the internet era, academic literature has remained steadfastly locked in the centuries-old subscription format, paywalled away from all but those who can afford to purchase access Even at public universities, where the salaries of faculty and staff and the operating costs of the institution are often heavily subsidized by taxpayer money, either directly by their states or indirectly through grants from NSF, NIH and other federal agencies, the majority of the research output of the institution is not publicly accessible. Instead, much of the world’s scholarly knowledge is owned and controlled by commercial enterprises that operate the journals that academic researchers publish in. The extreme cost and paywalled...

The NYTimes announced that it will join the Associated Press this week to change their style rule to lowercase the word "internet." As noted, "while most publications capitalized the word when it first came into widespread use, the lowercase form has become steadily more common in recent years." Changes like these provide insight into how style and usage can change over time: More broadly, modern usage tends to favor less capitalization — along with fewer hyphens and less punctuation in general. Capitalizing words when it isn’t strictly necessary can seem archaic to contemporary readers. The Times used to capitalize “Federal” in phrases like “a Federal judge,” and even “Government” when referring to the national government. Now both of those uses would be lowercase under our rules. Click the link to purchase the full NYTimes style & usage manual.

Check out my new RIPS Law Librarian Blog post on open access initiatives in legal scholarly publishing.

We've seen that publishing in open access avenues such as SSRN or an institutional repository result in a higher scholarly impact for articles . But some publishers are reluctant to adopt the model in favor of restrictive publication agreements that protect the bottom line. InsideHigherEd posted about Elsevier's newly established hosting and sharing policy created in 2015. Academic, library and technology organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy adopted by publisher Elsevier, saying it undermines open-access policies at colleges and universities and prevents authors from sharing their work. Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately “with a colleague or with an invitation-...

The Law Librarians blog posted about a paper by James Donovan, Carol Watson, and Caroline Osborne on SSRN called The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews . From the article: In answer to law faculty questions about how participation in an open access repository will affect the works’ impact, the present research offers a definitive reply. When looking at citation by other law reviews to all the author’s work, the averaged increase in citations in flagship journals is 53%. In general, half of these cites will be dispensed in the first six years after the article’s publication. OA articles will attract more attention earlier in the lifecycle of the publication, and endure longer on the intellectual stage. … For authors, the message is clear: The open access advantage is real, sizable, and consistent. The minimal effort to upload an article onto an OA platform such as SSRN or a school’s repository pays rich dividends in the currency of subsequent citations in law reviews a...

The things we spend our time on: Two librarians at Yale Law School have found that Yale Law School created The Bluebook , not The Harvard Law Review. As noted in the NYTimes article : Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable. True, true, and true. And the creation of this behemoth was originally credited to The Harvard Law Review. The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.”  The standard account of the origins of The Bluebook is reflected in a 1987 speech by Erwin N. Griswold, who had been president of The Harvard Law Rev...

The Atlantic ran an article recently that is near and dear to the heart of Scribes --The American Society of Legal Writers ' mission (disclosure: I am executive director of the organization). The article works to promote plain language. As noted, the problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. Take this example: The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected ...