Navel Gazing

The latest law blogging trend — self-citation studies. Volokh, Concurring Opinions, Conglomerate, and Balkinization all seem to be moving us to a new status symbol for academic blogs: How many times have you been cited? Although most bloggers watch their sitemeter stats to get a sense of how the blog is doing, we all know that a well-placed “popular” item–like a great post on naked Jennifer Aniston photos–may get you google-hits galore for years to come, skewing true readership statistics. But, law review citations, like diamonds, are forever!

Lest we miss the boat, I did a quick check of annual citations to Opinio Juris on westlaw’s JLR database for 2005-2007 (including both our current address and our old home at lawofnations.blogspot.com). Frankly, we got off to a slow start with only one post (a self-citation no less) in 2005; in 2006, we picked up steam, rising to 12 citations, but this past year we came to play, pulling in 24 citations so far (some 2007 publications have yet to appear in print)! Now, if somebody would only cite one of my posts . . .