A voice,
crying in the wilderness,
and then just crying

By Tom Smith

Do you sometimes feel, Professor, that no one is listening to you, that your articles are ignored? IS ANYBODY LISTENING?!! Well, the bad news is, you are probably right. That is, you probably are being ignored. I will try to make this point in forthcoming article(s), but probably no one will pay any attention to me, so this is your chance . . .

I just got some new data back from Lexis, with whom I am engaged in a massive citation study, but that's another story. This data concerns law review articles that are in their Shepard's database and how much they get cited. This data covers about 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc. etc. that appear in 726 law reviews and journals, and looks at how often they are cited. Cited by other law reviews, or cases.

First of all, 43 percent of the articles are not cited . . . at all. Zero, nada, zilch. Almost 80 percent (i.e. 79 percent) of law review articles get ten or fewer citations. So where are all the citations going? Well, let's look at articles that get more than 100 citations. These are the elite. They make up less than 1 percent of all articles, .898 percent to be precise. They get, is anybody listening out there? 96 percent of all citations to law review articles. That's all. Only 96 percent. Talk about concentration of wealth.

Why, you ask, is it like this? You should read my paper here, into which this new lawrev data will be incorporated, though I think it may justify a little article on its own. Similar dynamics are probably at work. Possible titles: Why this article (and yours) is a waste of time. Or, Stop that law professor before he writes again. This distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same. Your basic stretched exponential with a long tail, or some would say a power law distribution. On a log-log chart, close to a 45 degree line.

So stop that blogging, professors, and get back to writing those law review articles!