Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A growing body of research has explored the impact of social media activity on citation counts in the natural and social sciences. Using a novel dataset on Twitter activity by U.S. law professors as well as a novel corpus of law journal articles, we extend this research to legal scholarship. We find that joining Twitter increases citation counts by an average of 22% per year and improves article placements by up to 10 ranks for law professors, relative to a synthetic control group. These positive returns apply across nearly all classes of scholars and are magnified for those who post frequently about their own work. The identified citation boost would be even larger than 22% if it were not partially offset by a decline in citations to articles published pre-Twitter. Overall, our results suggest that social media participation yields concrete benefits in the legal academy — indeed, benefits outstripping those that prior studies have identified in other disciplines — along with a number of potential downsides.
Authors: Julian Nyarko, David E. Pozen
Institutions: Stanford University, Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415735887