Congratulations to Fordham Law School’s IR, FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History! Of over two million items published in Digital Commons repositories, an article published in the Fordham Law Review was among the top three publications in terms of downloads in October 2015. The spike in downloads can likely be traced to a 2015 article in the Huffington Post, which was reacting to a statement by Ben Carson that Hitler’s gun control laws led to the Holocaust. The same article was cited in Salon in 2013.
Bernard Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director at Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, is a critical legal theorist, and writes both in academic forums and popular media. Professor Harcourt can see where readers come from by accessing his Author Dashboard, as can all authors publishing in DC repositories. Authors can filter readership statistics by commercial organizations, educational institutions, government organizations, etc.
Professor Harcourt’s 2004 article, On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians), spiked from an average of about 600 downloads a month to 12,000 a month after being picked up by the Huffington Post and Salon. Given the current controversy on gun legislation, this article’s popularity is understandable, but what a feat to have now garnered 51,943 downloads in the Fordham Law School’s IR!
We encourage authors to check out their Dashboards—you never know what download metrics may be revealed there. And, IR administrators can now use the new Admin Dashboard to keep on top of readership statistics.
