Christopher Anthony Cotropia of the University of Richmond School of Law and Lee Petherbridge of Loyola Los Angeles School of Law have just posted "The Dominance of Teams in the Production of Legal Knowledge." Cribbing now from their abstract:
Using a database that contains over 19,000 law review articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010, we demonstrate that team authors dominate solo authors in the production of legal knowledge. Team research is on average more frequently cited than individual research, and teams are more likely than individuals to produce exceptionally high impact research. These results suggest that a legal research culture that encourages cooperativity and collaboration could foster an intellectual connectedness helpful to improving the quality of knowledge production by legal academics.
When I have more time I'd like to talk about their findings some more; for the time being I'd observe that I think we're increasingly in a world of co-operation. And I think it'll be increasingly important -- even if difficult -- to make the transition from individual to collaborative work. The data-driven world we live in increasingly demands collaboration among authors and teams of research assistants to collect the data.
Did the authors exclude student notes, which are always solo authored?
Posted by: Orin Kerr | February 06, 2013 at 05:50 PM
We did exclude student notes.
Posted by: Chris Cotropia | February 06, 2013 at 06:36 PM