The "Most-Cited Legal Periodicals: U.S. and selected non-U.S." site at
http://law.wlu.edu/library/research/lawrevs/mostcited.asp has been
updated. The previous listing showed citations from articles/cases for
1995-2002, the listing for 1996-2003 (with a cut-off date of October 31)
has been added. Because of the rotation of the years in the study, any
changes in the number of citations is mostly a comparison based on
losing 1995 and adding 2003. The top five journals maintained their
citation rankings, based on citations from journals, though only
citations to Harvard Law Review increased in number.
Rank Journal Name Journals Journals
1996-2003 1995-2002
1 Harvard Law Review 6682 6557
2 Yale Law Journal 5582 5716
3 Columbia Law Review 4742 5057
4 Stanford Law Review 4262 4400
5 Michigan Law Review 4065 4173
The size of the JLR and ALLCASES databases, for the periods of the
study, increased slightly over 3%, so it might have been expected that
the citations to these journals for 1996-2003 would have risen by a
comparable amount, there being more articles that might potentially cite
these journals. That didn't happen for these journals.
Some of the over 800 journals went up, and some down, but the average
number of citations stayed fairly steady. The 2002 study showed an
average of 358 journal articles citing each journal, and the current
study shows 361. The average for "general" journals fell slightly, from
783 (1995-2002) to 782 (1996-2003), and for "specialized" journals rose
from 200 (1995-2002) to 205 (1996-2003). Probably it would take several
years of a study like this to gain any interesting data about trends.
An individual journal might have a change in citation count because it
happened to have a good year in 1995 and not in 2003, or the reverse.
Or perhaps its publishing schedule was delayed.
A recent addition to the page is that if you click on the journal name
it will take you to an intermediate page with a link to the journal's
homepage, and a link to a journal name resolver that will let you know
(for those databases that W&L subscribes to) where it is possible to
find full-text articles.
John Doyle
Washington & Lee Law School Library
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