How to maximise your citations – some lessons for law academics

Using citation counts as an indicator of research quality is fraught with issues. Nevertheless, it is clear that our number of citations is one factor used by some to measure our research performance. With that in mind, there may be some value in examining what type of publications generate most citations. 

Ably assisted by my college Hoda Asgarian, I recently published some observations about citation and h-index averages for law academics on the Bond CPLE blog [view here]. The statistics collected for that study also allows for observations about what type of publications generate most citations which is my focus here.

The method

For the purpose of the mentioned blog post about citation and h-index averages for law academics, we gathered a dataset from Google Scholar regarding the law academics listed as being based at the Queensland campuses of all universities with a Queensland campus. Hoda carried out additional research for this blog post so that account also could be taken of law academics listed as being based at the Victoria campuses of all universities with a campus in Victoria and law academics listed as being based at the Western Australian campuses of all universities with a campus in Western Australia.

Based on this amended dataset, we extracted all those laws academics who – at the time of the research (October-November 2024) – have at least 1,000 citations. Focusing on only those law academics, we then looked at all research outputs by those law academics that had been cited at least 100 times. Thus, it could be said that the data in focus represent an indication of the most cited research outputs by the most cited researchers within the dataset.     

The outputs were divided into five categories:

1. Books;
2. Domestic law journal articles;
3. International law journal articles;
4. Book chapters; and
5. Others.

We also paid attention to whether the outputs were sole authored or co-authored.

The findings

Taking account of the law academics at the universities in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia, 62 academics of those with Google Scholar profiles were found to have a career total of at least 1,000 citations. Focusing on the research outputs by those 62 law academics, 252 publications were found that had been cited at least 100 times. 

Looking at those 252 publications, 148 (or 58.7%) were co-authored. Thus, while it may be assumed that the majority of publications by law academics still are sole-authored, the majority of publications that are highly cited are – judging by the findings of this limited study – co-authored.

The type of publication that most commonly gained high citation numbers was international law journal articles (63.5%), followed by books (25.8%). In contrast, domestic law journal articles merely represented 6.4% of the publications with 100+ citations and neither book chapter nor publications falling outside the noted categories did particularly well in attracting citations. This is no doubt partly a result of how Google Scholar collects data, and the figures must be approached with caution. Nevertheless, editors of domestic law journals may wish to take note of this. Furthermore, institutions harbouring ambitions to rank law journals ought to take account of the limited citations gained through domestic law journals as a ’reality-check’ and perhaps an antidote to excessive parochialism. 

It is also interesting to note that, while as mentioned, international law journal articles more commonly get cited 100+ times amongst the studied academics, books outperform all other publication types when it comes to the average number of citations of the publications type with 100+ citations. If we allow ourselves to speculate, perhaps this may be explained by books generally having a longer ‘shelf-life’ than do journal articles. Furthermore, our study did not determine the percentage within each publication type that gained 100+ citations. Thus, the higher percentage associated with international law journal articles, compared to books, likely stems from more journal articles being written than books. 

At any rate, summarising the above, the following table can be presented: 

For those interested, I should also mention that expanding the jurisdictional coverage to include Victoria and Western Australia in relation to the statistics for citation and h-index averages for law academics presented in the earlier blog post some interesting observations could be made. Most importantly, doing so suggests that, while there is some variation between the three studied states, the differences are limited and the figures for Queensland may be representative as an average (although further research would of course be most welcomed so as to ensure a national, or why not international, coverage). 

This table provides a summary:

Concluding remarks

I present the above for what it is worth. I am by no means advocating that citation counts should be relied upon in assessing researchers’ performance. After all, the issues are well known and include concerns such as self-citation, and the fact that several of the most cited publications are cited for the simple reason that a large majority disagree with the published findings to such a degree that they feel obligated to counter them. For anyone interested in the concerns about relying on citation counts, Korobkin has outlined a useful list of ten different scenarios where a citation has nothing to do with quality.  

Furthermore, I obviously realise that the sample we relied upon is small and limited. Further research is required to show whether the findings presented here are representative on broader level, domestically and internationally.

With these caveats in mind, I hope that this short post still can be of some interest and hopefully spark further discussions.