Join Twitter!  As one suspected…

Professors Nyarko and Pozen write:

[T]he abnormally large Twitter bump that we detect in law [compared to other fields] deserves further inquiry. The discrepancy is not driven by differences in citation rates across disciplines, because we benchmark our results against typical citation rates within the field. Two hypotheses strike us as particularly plausible. First, legal scholarship’s relative lack of “scientific rigor” (Posner 2011, p. 860) and “widely shared standards of quality” (West & Citron 2014, p. 2; see also Snell 2019) might make it more susceptible to social media influence, as compared to disciplines in which citation practices are dictated to a greater extent by consensus professional norms. Twitter’s effect on citations, that is, may be larger in fields where authors enjoy greater discretion regarding whom and what to cite. Second, the endlessly debated role of current students in running most law journals (Cotton 2006; Friedman 2018; Lindgren 1994; Wise et al. 2013) might increase the impact of Twitter, insofar as student editors tend to be more attentive to social media cues when deciding which pieces to accept for publication. The phenomenon of law professors pitching new articles to student editors through Twitter reflects and reinforces this possibility.