Reading Time: 11 minutes
Let us take a walk into the unknown. I have spent most of the last year thinking about how legal scholarship is promoted and connected. Not so much from the perspective of the librarian assisting faculty, but from the perspective of the librarian or lecturer who is promoting their own scholarship. One of our law school faculty asked me an open ended “what do you think” question recently, and I finally condensed down my thinking. I thought I’d share it in case anyone else can build on it.
I had not worked in an academic role that required scholarship before. If you interview for a law school job that does, though, you will get the standard question: what is your research agenda. I had anticipated the question but had not really thought very much past that. After I finished a job interview in November 2023, I started to wonder about how legal scholars appear to the world. Where would you find out about a person who publishes, rather than where would you find what they publish?
This post applies to authors outside of law schools. If you’ve got lawyers publishing in bar association magazines or with the ABA or doing CLE presentations to clients or colleagues, or you’re in a government library and you or your judges are publishing anywhere, almost all of these resources are available to you too. I think every law institution with authors faces the same challenges.
This led me into some known corners—Elsevier’s Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Google Scholar, HeinOnline for law journals—and some that were new to me: ORCID, HeinOnline’s Author Profile and ScholarRank. I started to think more about what these do and, frankly, are incapable of doing, to make an author visible. In particular, how does an author make visible what they do beyond a single journal publication.
Eventually, I joined a law faculty and went from the person ingesting the information to a person who is expected to create the information. Things I had done, like creating an ORCID account or linking it to my HeinOnline profile, started to matter a bit more. At our university, we use the Symplectic platform to publish our activity for tenure and promotion purposes. For those with longer memories, it is very similar to an Elsevier SelectedWorks or Expert Gallery profile (which is sunsetting at the end of December 2024).
But so what? There are all of these buckets of information, profiles to build and maintain. What is a good way to manage all of these things in an efficient way to present a consistent face to the world as an author? I decided to think more about how to put them together as a foundation for the next step, which is increased visibility.
Survey Your Tools
This is the first challenge: what do you have and how does it work? I think that one challenge is that, if you do not have access to all of the tools (if you are supporting authors who have accounts that you do not), it can be hard to know. If authors are not themselves conversant with the tools, they may not know how things might fit together. This is where I started because I had access.
SSRN
This seems to be a baseline place to publish law journal articles, whether they’re works in progress or in the publication pipeline. It doesn’t seem to be more than that or have wider applicability to other authors in the legal profession. For example, it’s not a profile site where you would link to interviews or things that might not be “scholarly”. SSRN’s expression of its content is:
SSRN´s User Headquarters allows you to submit and manage your abstracts/papers in SSRN´s eLibrary. In order to be accepted to SSRN´s eLibrary, a research paper must be the result of significant study and be part of the world-wide scholarly discourse covered by one or more of SSRN´s subject area networks.
I will note two weasel words for those who are, like me, either outside or new to academia. “Significant” seems extraordinarily woolly and is not vetted in any way. Over the years, I have found things on SSRN that are not significant from my perspective. It may be citations-by-judges or citations-by-colleagues, which would be an insular measurement of significance. Also, “scholarly” seems to be in the eye of the beholder.
This guideline did not, in fact, help me understand what I could or couldn’t put in SSRN as an author, although I would be probably err on the end of being highly selective, which dilutes the value of participating if someone looking for my publications would only see a small set of publications. As a profile outpost, then, it’s perhaps a “nice to have” but not vital
There does not appear to be any integration with any other services. You can upload your own publications but it seems like a narrow content scope. To the extent an author is publishing outside of law journals, which will be necessary to raise one’s profile, SSRN seems poorly suited for visibility. The site is also owned by a publisher, which makes me wonder if the content may be doing more work for their commercial interests than for the author’s.
This leads me to one of the questions I do not know how to answer: who cares about SSRN? If you will give me a bit of latitude, legal scholarship is not used by many people, not even by people with legal research needs or legal issues. So I am not sure why an author would spend time uploading content to this site. If you are like me, you’re blocking their trackers, so it is not a reliable metrics source for keeping up with the Dr. Jones. An author on SSRN may not even get a download or visit recorded every time someone swings by. Do law faculty start here looking for each other? Would anyone else? Is it a simple repository, which begs the question why an author with a corporate repository would use it?
I have known of SSRN for many years but I never created a profile. I was surprised that Elsevier had created one for me when I joined the law faculty. Not really thrilled to have their assistance, especially as there are hurdles for me to use the profile (I can’t upload my photo until I upload content, for example). But I could see new faculty or authors not knowing it was out there because of it’s limited utility.
I’m not going to delve into other, similar sites like Law Review Commons that are essentially islands and not profile-focused. It’s a simple search interface using Elsevier’s bepress digital repository. Accessible, but ugly. It’s a front end to whatever law schools have opted in to both licensing bepress and adding the author’s publication to their local law school bepress instance. I’m not sure who would be looking for this site since it’s not comprehensive and, if you’re in a law institution and seeking something, you’re probably using HeinOnline.
HeinOnline
HeinOnline needs no introduction to law librarians. I was trying to explain it to someone from a different discipline (medicine) and they were amazed that it existed. It is a gated community, so while it has resources for authors, not everyone on the internet can see them. I have an icon on my “Find me” sidebar that goes to my HeinOnline author profile. But you can’t see it unless you are a HeinOnline subscriber.
HeinOnline automagickally creates author profiles. I documented my problems with this—it aggregated every “David Whelan” into a profile until someone claims a profile and cleans it up for Hein—but it’s easy enough to sort out. Like SSRN, though, this automated process means an author may not know they have a profile on HeinOnline or whether it’s an accurate representation of their work.
HeinOnline doesn’t allow for customization of content it adds to your profile but it does offer integration with ORCID, which I’ll touch on below. You can update your profile personal details by submitting change requests. To that extent, HeinOnline gives an author the ability to make their profile richer than SSRN. If people know to look for it. I would love to see HeinOnline expose more of this to the profile owner, so they can update a headshot or change other details without intermediation.
Google Scholar
Scholar is well-known and has the benefit of Google juice. It also automagickally creates a profile for people that may or may not have the right content. I’m not going to talk about it but if you have interest and publish or blog, you should probably look at Muckrack as another of these auto-profile sites.
Scholar offers tools for adding or removing incorrect results. It also has the ability to add things that don’t have a web URL. The functionality is limited. For example, I have a book record but there is no way to link it to WorldCat or some other URL (like an open access version of the book).

Scholar doesn’t seem to have any quality control because it can generate records that are incorrect. So if you have a record like this one:

that ostensibly comes from HeinOnline, you would want to know so that you can fix it. In reality, this is not something I even authored. It is a book review written by someone else in a Canadian law library publication about a book I wrote. I can fix it, now that I know it exists, but it’s not my record. If you don’t fix it, though, no one else is likely to.
ORCID
ORCID was new to me last November. It’s a profile site not a content site. Science or social science authors outside of law may find it easier to use. My experience was that you had to manually add a lot of information because my publications were not in the databases or resources that would automatically retrieve relevant records.
As I now know, this is because of ORCID’s focus on publishers that largely excludes legal publishing. I think ORCID is really the key account because, if you connect it, there is a way to push HeinOnline publications to ORCID and save yourself a bunch of work.
ORCID would also work really well for lawyers at law firms who want to have a public-facing profile just of their professional activities. Lawyers who write blog-like guidance on the la firm’s website or who give CLEs to clients or industry groups could link those resources into this profile. The URL would go to the law firm, providing an additional authoritative link to the law firm’s content. Unlike LinkedIn, it wouldn’t be subject to the vagaries of Microsoft’s business model, which may limit some profile access. Similarly, judges or legal professionals who do not operate on LinkedIn or other business development profile sites could use this for their own activity aggregator.
Corporate Portals
Your law school (I think it’s only going to be law schools, not law firms, who are probably using LinkedIn for this) may also have a corporate profile site. Ours is known internally as MyActivities and is used for promotion and tenure-related reporting. But there is a public-facing side called the UICollaboratory where you can choose to have your work visible.
The other benefit to our corporate portal is that it is wired into our campus digital repository (not the law school digital repository that would surface content in Law Review Commons). This means that, as an author, I can add a record to my profile and use integration to push a PDF of the article to the campus repository.
Implement a Strategy
I am sure I am missing some author profile sources but those are the ones I’ve looked at. Feel free to add others in the comments below. But this is enough of a list to start to develop a strategy for promoting an author’s work. Personally, I think this is the author’s responsibility but I know that law librarians sometimes help with this work are delegated access to the author’s profile. The challenge will come that not all profile resources allow for delegated access and I don’t think you should ever share a username and password.
The strategy that I recommended to our professor was based on the tools we have available. This might not be the same for everyone, although I think the considerations are probably pretty similar. You might just have fewer steps.
The first thing I would do is ensure I had an ORCID profile. I do not think you need to build it out at this point. Perhaps add a single publication so that it has something in it. But I would create this profile first. I think an ORCID account would be useful even if you’re not in academia, because it is a persistent URL you can share that is public. LinkedIn accounts aren’t always fully public and, it being a commercial provider, may or may not last for a career (or someone with a profile may decide to close it).
The next step would be to see if you have a repository or corporate profile portal you can connect to ORCID. ORCID has the ability for you to connect trusted parties. I was able to connect our UIC platform (MyActivities) to ORCID so that, in theory, there will be some sharing of information to save me from manually adding information to ORCID. HeinOnline can also be set as a trusted party. I have not found anything that suggests LinkedIn can.
HeinOnline’s Author profile would be the next step. Log in to HeinOnline and find your author profile if you have not already claimed it. It may require clean up if you have a common name and it has merged a bunch of authors together. This requires you to work through HeinOnline support staff. You can’t make the edits yourself.
Connect HeinOnline to ORCID. This should allow for some information flow from one to the other. Once you have made the connection, you can push your HeinOnline citations out to ORCID. This does two things. First, it saves you a bunch of work on your own by eliminating the need to manually create records. Second, it shows that HeinOnline created the record, which I think is a bit more authoritative than “David Whelan” manually creating them.
This doesn’t mean you should. HeinOnline is still a closed garden. So if, for example, you have an AALL Spectrum publication, the HeinOnline record is locked to public access. You might, like I have, create a manual record that points to the web-visible version that AALL posts publicly. This may also be more stable, since HeinOnline may or may not be licensing third-party content that may disappear in the future. Also, HeinOnline is a limited source. I created manual records for my books and for things that exist outside HeinOnline.
SSRN is an island. I’m not sure really what to say about it. I guess it’s important for law faculty looking for law faculty. I don’t have any data about whether it’s useful or not. I know there is a lot of prestige activity in law schools and I wonder if this is one of those. I think that, once you’ve uploaded content there and built out the limited profile available, it’s probably set-and-forget.
Google Scholar is also an island. But if you have a campus repository, it may be indexed by Google Scholar. UIC’s repository is. This means that, once I have added my article to the corporate portal (MyActivities) for tenure, and uploaded the PDF to our university (not law school) repository, Google Scholar will index it.
Once Google Scholar has it indexed, I can log into my Google Scholar profile and add the indexed item to my profile. Claim it, in other words. Like the HeinOnline-to-ORCID integration, I like this better than having to manually add items. It feels like it will have more authenticity to a visitor.
This should mean that you now have content profiles:
- At ORCID, which is web visible
- At your corporate portal, which is probably web visible or can be
- At HeinOnline, which is a walled garden
- At Google Scholar, which is web visible
- At SSRN, which is web visible.
Give it a couple of days and see what your web search results are like. In my case, the UIC properties appear first (my faculty profile, my UICollaboratory page), then sites like Google Scholar and ORCID. I’m not sure how to gin up SSRN visibility. I don’t have any publications one that island. I put in one of our faculty and the SSRN articles they wrote will appear, and also a profile but their SERP positioning is irregular and dependent on my search criteria, even if it’s just their name. It might be better if I was looking for content in a journal article although I think that’s limiting. The whole idea of these profiles and integration is to help people who do not know about the published scholarship to find the author.
Profile Promotion
This is really when you get to the question we should be asking at the start. What are you trying to do? This strategy and approach will, I think, improve the findability of an author who wants to be found by Google or Bing search engines. I think it is also a relatively well-integrated approach that will minimize the extra work that someone needs to do when they have a new publication.
But that assumes a public audience that uses search engines. Do law faculty do that? Or do they go to SSRN, like a weird LinkedIn, and search there for each other? Or do they choose some other island like HeinOnline or Law Review Commons or Google Scholar and look just within that repo? I have no idea. I need to learn more about who the law faculty want to be more visible to.
This means that this approach may not align with the author’s goals. However, I think that an author who wants to be visible to the rest of the world will benefit from this approach. In particular, if there is a push by an author or by a law school administration for greater visibility, this may be a better way to connect with journalists or others who might amplify the author’s work.
There is also a benefit to doing the pre-work to make sure the profiles are all in place and are being tended. When I first dug into this, it was like wading through a garden that people had just thrown their rubbish into. These profiles will exist whether or not authors tend them. If someone wants to make a push to raise their expertise visibility, they should make sure these profiles are in good order.
This is not the end of the story though. There is one more step, which is that the author needs to take actions to bring themselves into visibility. I have recommended to a couple of faculty that they look at The Conversation, an information source created by universities to amplify faculty scholarship. The content is written in an accessible way and The Conversation has been successful at syndicating. There are also good analytics for the university and authors to see whether their work is getting traction.
Authors who are also blogging can use their platforms to reach out to audiences and leverage their portal profiles that way. But most law faculty are not blogging as far as I can tell. The blog remains a derided resource in academia, speaking as someone who has experienced that derision, because it’s not scholarship. I doubt most faculty would naturally think of writing a short, accessible piece for public consumption as a way to draw people into their denser scholarship. But a blog-like publication would be more likely to be seen than a journal article.
Once an author has their scholarly portals sorted out, if they were to publish in something like The Conversation (or some other publication that is absolutely not a scholarly publication: trade publication, bar association magazine, etc.), they are more likely to reach people who are looking for interview subjects, experts for in-house education, that sort of thing. That’s the next leg of the path I’m going to be looking at. That and how to measure these efforts, to see which of these profiles actually lead to new opportunities.
Finally, if you know of profile resources or integrations that I’m missing, drop them in the comments below. What I don’t know could fill volumes. I’m not really interested in where the publications can be published. But if there are resources authors can use to aggregate their publications and professional activity that are web visible, that would be helpful.