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Citation Metrics for Legal Information Retrieval: Scholars and Practitioners Intertwined?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2022

Gineke Wiggers ,
Suzan Verberne  and
Gerrit-Jan Zwenne
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Abstract

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

Keywords

bibliometricscitationslegal information retrievalNetherlands
Type
Legal Informatics
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 88 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

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Footnotes

Gineke Wiggers is affiliated with Legal Intelligence as business analyst. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the 8th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2019) at ECIR 2019 as G. Wiggers and S. Verberne (2019) Citation Metrics for Legal Information Retrieval Systems, available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2345/paper4.pdf. This work expands on the previous work by an increased sample size, more thorough methodological description, analysis of the inter-rater agreement and statistical analysis of the results, a much expanded literature section, and a more substantial discussion.

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