The above image is Prrit Parmakson's elegant recasting of a cruder image that I created.
... but the use of citation counts or GOOGLE hits alone to measure the utility or scholarly merit of legal scholarship warrants the derogatory label "industrial scholarship"...
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Does the techonological progress in 'attention economics' encourage scholarship?
With internet analytics software, viewing of even single bits of information can be made measurable. For example, I have installed the Sitemeter.com tool at my blog. It tracks all visits, sometimes bringing out insightful information about readers' habits and motivation. Somebody had searched on Google with keywords "Solomon metaphor" - and my blog came up 5th in the result list (because of the reference to Samuel Solomon's talk in one of my entries!). But the visitor actually was searching for King Solomon - or something else.
Statistics can be addictive. Blog owners become to craft their content to entice more visitors. I have seen IT people writing detailed software help manuals for free - motivated by thousands of thankful readers who come to visit if the stuff is good. (Software companies have become lazy - for usable documentation for IT you better google for it.) It's a good thing - but something in scholarship imminently is AGAINST the popularity.
Authors who publish legal scholarship in SSRN can view the statistics of readership. How does one come to read an SSRN article? The reader must see an attractive title, read the abstract, then the chances are that the article will be downloaded. Authors seem to be very careful to compose attractive titles. But not every abstract view translates into download.
For example, a recent article with an innovative title -
“An RSVP to Professor Wexler’s Warm TJ Invitation: Unable to Join You, Already (Somewhat Similarly) Engaged”, - has got only one paper download for 35 views of paper's abstract.
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