Law X.0

UK Law Student Blogs

Just a sampling of UK law student blogs from this interesting corner of the blogosphere.

Diaries of UK Law Students is a group blog containing the "the thoughts and ramblings" of UK law students trying to make it to qualification. The students are all at different stages of that journey.

See also:

• Lost London Law Student
• Barrister 2 b
• Legal Lass
• Legally Blonde in London
• and my favorite, Asp Bites: The Random Meandering of a Law Student.

[JH]

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

Interesting article from ReadWriteWeb:

"In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments."

[RJ]

Online Companions to Law Reviews -- Fizz or Fizzle?

Online law review companions can take several forms (websites, blogs, forums, etc) for a number of purposes (publishing scholarship on topics that might not fit the editorial confines of the hardcopy review,  providing a means for responses and critiques of recently published articles, etc). On PrawfsBlawg, Scott Dodson (Arkansas) wonders about the value of online companions to law reviews. Do they?  Unfortunately, Dodson poses the question without surveying the landscape of this form of web communications.

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

Open Access Publishing in the Legal Academy

Gene Koo, CALI Fellow and co-editor of Law School Innovation blog, writes:

The openness of law schools'journals is largely due to history rather than deliberate planning. It gives law schools a huge potential leg up in entering the digital knowledge network, but because it's arisen by happenstance, it's also vulnerable to being undermined. It would be ironic indeed if, as the rest of academia moves towards openness that law schools could be at risk of being hemmed in.

Gene proceeds to outline some fundamental steps for an action plan for open access publishing in the legal academy. Check out his post, Harvard's open publishing policy and the outlook for law schools. I encourage you to submit your thoughts to Gene in the form of comments to his post. [JH]

Review of Metric Services for Digital Libraries and Repositories

Chris Armbruster's (Research Associate, Max Planck Digital Library and Executive Director, Research Network 1989) Access, Usage and Citation Metrics: What Function for Digital Libraries and Repositories in Research Evaluation? is available from SSRN. Here's the abstract for this very interesting and helpful review article:

The growth and increasing complexity of global science poses a grand challenge to scientists: How to organise the worldwide evaluation of research programmes and peers? For the 21st century we need not just information on science, but also meta-level scientific information that is delivered to the digital workbench of every researcher. Access, usage and citation metrics will be one major information service that researchers will need on an everyday basis to handle the complexity of science.

Scientometrics has been built on centralised commercial databases of high functionality but restricted scope, mainly providing information that may be used for research assessment. Enter digital libraries and repositories: Can they collect reliable metadata at source, ensure universal metric coverage and defray costs?

This systematic appraisal of the future role of digital libraries and repositories for metric research evaluation proceeds by investigating the practical inadequacies of current metric evaluation before defining the scope for libraries and repositories as new players. Subsequently the notion of metrics as research information services is developed. Finally, the future relationship between a) libraries and repositories and b) metrics databases, commercial or non-commercial, is addressed.

Service reviewed include: Leiden Ranking, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, COUNTER, MESUR, Harzing POP, CiteSeer, Citebase, RePEc LogEc and CitEc, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.

[JH]