Faculty Services

The Law Library offers a number of services to support your scholarship, including:

• Tracking citations to your scholarship, using data from HeinOnline, Westlaw, Google Scholar, and SSRN;
• Finding blogs, newsletters, and other resources to help keep you aware of new publication opportunities, conferences, etc.;
• Providing one-on-one guidance on search engine optimization, open access journals, and the University's Knowledge Bank; and
• Assisting you in how to create and edit accounts on HeinOnline, ORCID, Google Scholar, and others.

Contact the Reference Desk for more information on these services or if you have questions about other ways you would like the Library to support your scholarship.

Many blogs compile and repost calls for papers and other upcoming publication opportunities. For example:

• Legal Scholarship Blog, a collaborative effort by law librarians at several law schools
• The Faculty Lounge is a blog maintained by a group of U.S. law school faculty; part of the blog's content includes Calls for Papers
• Calling All Papers!, a blog by the University of Georgia Law Library

Another way to keep up with calls for papers is to follow Scholastica Law Review (@scholasticaLR) on Twitter.

One way to promote the visibility of your scholarship is to publish in open access journals, like the Journal of Open Access to Law (JOAL) or one of the growing number of publications that make up the Law Review Commons, a part of the Digital Commons Network's Law Commons. 

The Knowledge Bank, the University's open source institutional repository, is another way to improve your publication's visibility. Not only does the Knowledge Bank preserve your scholarship in one, central location, but it also assigns each publication a "persistent identifier" in the form of a permanent, stable URL and allows search engines (e.g., Google, Google Scholar) to index your publications.

All of these features make it easier for scholars and students to find and access your scholarship.

Interested faculty should contact the Reference Desk, and a librarian will work with you, the Knowledge Bank's Repository Services, and the University Libraries' Publishing Program and Copyright Services to resolve any permissions, rights statements, fair use, or other copyright-related issues.

Setting up your author profiles can also increase the visibility of your scholarship.

For guidance on how to set up and edit your author profiles, start with:

• HeinOnline's How To Edit Your Own Author Page and full list of Author Profile guides
• ORCID's Getting Started with your ORCID Record guide and their ORCID for Researchers page
• Google Scholar's Setting Up Your Profile guide and full overview of Google Scholar Profiles 
• SSRN's What is an SSRN Author Profile? guide and SSRN Support Center

Contact the Reference Desk for additional guidance on how to set up and edit your faculty profiles.

Although it is difficult to capture the impact of a faculty member's scholarship, it is possible to track metrics like how often a publication is accessed, downloaded, or cited. For law faculty, these metrics are most commonly taken from HeinOnline, Westlaw, Google Scholar, and SSRN. These databases allow you to set up alerts to pull this data and have it sent directly to your email address annually, quarterly, or as often as you would like.

For help tracking your citations, contact the Reference Desk.