The Most-Cited Articles from the Iowa Law Review

• Author: Fred R. Shapiro
• Position: Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School
• Pages: 1-6

The Most-Cited Articles from the Iowa Law Review Fred R. Shapiro  On the occasion of the centennial of the Iowa Law Review, I have compiled lists of that journal’s most-cited articles of all time. Two different lists are presented here. The first tabulates the 50 (actually 51 because of a tie) Iowa Law Review articles that are most cited by other legal periodical articles. The second list sets forth the 10 (actually 11 because of a tie) articles most cited by federal and state judicial opinions. I have discussed the rationale of legal citation-counting in a series of previous studies. 1 Interested readers may consult those studies, but I will summarize here the basic rationale. Citation analysis is a standard tool used by information scientists and sociologists studying the history and structure of various academic disciplines. It has also become common to use citation counts to aid in evaluating publications, authors, journals, or schools. Such evaluative use is often justified by research that has demonstrated a high degree of correlation between the total of citations to an author or publication and “judgments by peers of the ‘productivity,’ ‘significance,’ ‘quality,’ ‘utility,’ ‘influence,’ ‘effectiveness,’ or ‘impact’ of [scholars] and their scholarly products.” 2 Responsible citation analysts, however, are careful to note that citation counts measure a “quality” that is socially defined, reflecting the usefulness of the writings in question to other scholars or to judges, rather than necessarily gauging their intrinsic merit.  Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School; Editor, Yale Book of Quotations and Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. 1. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles, 73 CALIF. L. REV. 1540 (1985); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 YALE L.J. 1449 (1991); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited, 71 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 751 (1996); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 409 (2000); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Books Since 1978, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 397 (2000); Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Reviews, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 389 (2000); Fred R. Shapiro & Michelle Pearse, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, 110 MICH. L. REV. 1483 (2012). 2. Stephen M. Lawani & Alan E. Bayer, Validity of Citation Criteria for Assessing the Influence of Scientific Publications: New Evidence with Peer Assessments, 34 J. AM. SOC’Y FOR INFO. SCI. 59, 61 (1983). 2 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:1 The value of citation-counting may also be lessened by limitations in the accuracy, coverage, or timeframe of the source data. The Iowa Law Review tabulations set forth below, however, are based on the spectacular capabilities of the very accurate and comprehensive database HeinOnline. HeinOnline, produced by the...