Publishing Legal Scholarship

Where should I publish?

Where you should publish your legal scholarship depends on your audience. Assuming your audience is legal scholars, consider the following as you determine the best publication in which to place your piece:

Who is my audience?

• If you audience is legal scholars, law reviews and journals are a great place to publish. If your audience is practicing attorneys, a bar journal or legal news source may be a better option. Also consider that your research can reach multiple audiences through different versions (e.g., a law review article plus a blog post that distills the main points). 

If you are trying to reach legal scholars generally, which law reviews and journals have full text availability in Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline?

• Having an article available in all three of these services is an excellent way to make your articles accessible to legal scholars. HeinOnline is also well indexed by Google Scholar, so your articles will also be picked up easily through a Google Scholar search.
• This is of course just one consideration: there may be a well-respected peer-reviewed publication in your research area that will reach your target audience even if it is not available in Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline.

What is the reputation of the journal or law review?

• Many disagreements can exist on the "reputation" of a given publication. Looking at the impact of the journal, however, is one way to gauge how often articles from that publication are cited.
  • A popular measure of impact and reputation in legal scholarship is Washington & Lee's law journal rankings. 

Where can I find calls for papers?

• The University of Georgia Law Library hosts a website that collects calls for papers here.
• The Legal Scholarship Blog posts calls for papers, as well as general legal scholarship resources. 

What assistance is available from the University if I would like to publish in a journal that charges open access fees?

The Big Ten Academic Alliance also have agreements with a variety of publishers that provide University of Iowa scholars with either (1) open access publishing options with fees waived, or (2) open-access publishing options with fee discounts. Examples of publishers with whom the University has agreements are:

• Cambridge Journals
• PLOS
• Wiley

A full list is available through the University Libraries Open Scholarship Toolkit and visit the Big Ten Academic Alliance's website for detailed information. 

If I'm a College of Law faculty member who needs access to the College of Law's Scholastica account, who do I contact?

Please contact Nilza Molina at nilza-molina@uiowa.edu.