Scholarly Impact in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

By any measure, the most widely read thing that I’ve ever written was a tweet—one that registered over 10.9 million “impressions,” a statistic that captures the number of times an individual tweet appeared in readers’ Twitter timelines or search results. That eclipses my most downloaded paper ever by a factor of . . . over 7000. And although that tweet was not especially scholarly (unless you teach grammar, in which case you might even think that it was wrong), I spend much of my time on Twitter attempting to provide substantive legal content on matters within my academic wheelhouse—for instance, close and careful tracking of the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket.” Although I also use Twitter for (most) of the bad reasons (Let’s Go Mets!), my principal use is to share news, legal analysis, and my and others’ scholarly ideas. The question is whether, for professional purposes, that’s all anything other than a frolic. Forests have already been felled on the perils of being an academic on Twitter, including the possibility that, without an edit button, we might cause harm to our reputations by writing something either blatantly incorrect or substantively objectionable; the absence of the intellectual rigor that characterizes more classical forms of scholarship; and, perhaps at a more banal level, the sheer time that it can take away from nobler professional pursuits. These concerns are quite real. But going by my experience, at least, there are also at least three significant upsides that are also worth weighing for those debating the virtues and vices of being an academic on social media in 2021. First, if nothing else, Twitter is a great forum for drawing attention to professional work that might be less visible on its own. When I finish a paper, publish an op-ed, or file a brief, I’ll contemporaneously tweet a URL link to the underlying document along with a brief summary. It’s possible for sufficiently motivated individuals to find (most of) these things on their own, but Twitter dramatically reduces (and accelerates) that effort. And “retweets” by others, whether with or without an endorsement, can further increase that visibility. For