Twitter Feedback Leads to New Metric

Professor Orin Kerr is one of the Law Journal Library‘s most popular authors and an avid user of Twitter. Recently, Professor Kerr sent us a direct message on Twitter with several points of feedback on HeinOnline’s Author Profile Pages. He offered the suggestion to add a new metric: average number of citations per article. This new metric counts the cumulative number of times this author’s articles have been cited by other articles, then divides this number by this author’s total number of articles written, to calculate the average number of citations per article.

The new metric is not factored into an author’s overall ScholarCheck ranking analysis, but is provided as a point of interest for students, professors, attorneys, and other researchers.

Other Recent Updates to Author Profile Pages

In the past year, author profile pages have received a facelift in addition to several functionality updates.

Icons replaced links for several key features, and the overall appearance of the author profile pages was streamlined. Once inside an author profile page, hover over any icon for a brief description of its functionality.

The self-citation metric was added in early 2018. This metric counts the cumulative number of times that an author has cited his or her own work. It is not factored into the overall ScholarCheck ranking analysis, nor does it affect the cumulative citation count. The addition of this feature, back in December, caused quite the buzz. Check out this blog post all about self-citation metrics and why it sparked a discussion on Twitter.

A new email alert type was also added. Users can sign up to be alerted when articles are added to HeinOnline that are similar to those written by a specific author. This blog post explains much more about email alerts, and this one, aptly titled Everything You Need to Know about Author Profile Pages, provides an excellent overview of author profiles generally, as well as a summary of available features.

What’s Coming Up?

We wish we could tell you! We have exciting things in the works for HeinOnline’s Author Profile Pages. Stay on top of All Things HeinOnline by following us on Twitter, liking us on Facebook, following our blogs, and signing up for our monthly newsletter!

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