Citation Databases for Legal Scholarship

Abstract

Traditional citation sources, such as Web of Science, index limited numbers of law journals. Consequently, although not designed for generating scholarship citation metrics, many law scholarship citation studies use law-specific databases like Westlaw or LexisNexis to gather citations. This article compares citation metrics derived from Web of Science and Westlaw to metrics derived from Google Scholar and HeinOnline’s citation tools. The study finds that HeinOnline and Westlaw generate higher metrics than Web of Science, and Google Scholar generates higher metrics than both. However, metrics from all four sources are highly correlated, so rankings generated from any may be very similar.