Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law

Using a novel dataset on Twitter activity as well as a novel corpus of law journal publications, this paper examines the impact of social media activity on the scholarly success of U.S. law professors. 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.