The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time

Fred R. Shapiro (Yale) & Michelle Pearse (Harvard), The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, 110 Mich. L. Rev. 1483 (2012):

This Essay updates two well-known earlier studies [The Most-Cited Law Review Articles, 73 Calif. L. Rev. 1540 (1985); The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 751 (1996)] by the first coauthor, setting forth lists of the most-cited law review articles. New research tools from the HeinOnline and Web of Science databases now allow lists to be compiled that are more thorough and more accurate than anything previously possible. Tables printed here present the 100 most-cited legal articles of all time, the 100 most-cited articles of the last twenty years, and some additional rankings. Characteristics of the top-ranked publications, authors, and law schools are analyzed as are trends in schools of legal thought. Data from the all-time rankings shed light on contributions to legal scholarship made over a long historical span; the recent-article rankings speak more to the impact of scholarship produced in the current era. The authors discuss alternative tools and metrics for measuring the impact of legal scholarship, running selected articles from the rankings through these tools to serve as points of illustration. The authors then contemplate how these alternative tools and metrics intersect with traditional citation studies and how they might impact legal scholarship in the future.

• ABA Journal, Critical Race Theory Is Less Popular, While Interest in IP Rises, Law Review Citation Study Finds
• National Law Journal, The Most-Cited Law Reviews? Harvard Still Leads, but Yale Is Gaining Ground
• WSJ Law Blog, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time