Female law review authors are cited at a higher rate than men, study finds
The conventional wisdom is that scholarly research by women is cited less often than that of male authors.
But that doesn’t hold true for legal scholarship, the National Law Journal (sub. req.) reports. Law review articles with at least one female author are cited at a higher rate than those written entirely by men, though the difference is not overwhelming.
The research found that, for each citation of an article written by a man, an article written by a woman was cited 1.3 times, the National Law Journal says.
A draft article at Social Science Research Network has the findings by law professors Christopher Cotropia of the University of Richmond and Lee Petherbridge of Loyola Law School Los Angeles.
The authors studied about 19,000 articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010. Women were the authors of about 27 percent of those articles. The number of citations for each article in other law reviews was gathered in November 2012.
Cotropia and Petherbridge broke down the number of citations by percentiles, and found the highest rates of citation to female-authored articles at the 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles. The findings suggest that women might be disproportionately responsible for higher-impact research, the authors say.
The article receiving the most citations—1,264—was written by Angela Harris and published in the Stanford Law Review in 1990. It was “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.”
