For American law professors, joining Twitter paid off in the currency academics care about most. Professors who signed up received on average 22% more citations per year than closely matched colleagues who stayed off the platform, and placed their articles in journals up to 10 ranks higher.
The study, “Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law”, is by Julian Nyarko of Stanford University and David E. Pozen of Columbia University. It was published online on October 31, 2025 in the Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis.
Building the data from scratch
The authors assembled three new datasets. They digitised decades of the Association of American Law Schools’ directories to track 19,526 scholars, used a corpus of 167,881 law journal articles from 186 publications to build a citation network, and pulled every public tweet from 1,133 law professors listed in a crowd-sourced Twitter census.
The combined panel covered 10,403 scholars. About 8% were on Twitter, with a median join year of 2012.
Because the decision to join Twitter is not random, a simple comparison of tweeters and non-tweeters could mislead. Instead the authors built a “synthetic control” for each professor who joined: a weighted blend of the 100 non-Twitter professors whose citation records before that date looked most similar. The gap between each professor and their synthetic twin after joining is the estimated effect.
The Twitter bump
Before joining, actual and predicted citations tracked each other closely. After joining, citations jumped well above the predicted path and above anything seen in placebo tests run on non-Twitter professors.
The average gain was 22% per year. Citations to articles written after joining rose by 137%, while citations to older articles fell relative to the control group, which suggests new work partly replaced old work in other scholars’ footnotes. Without that offset, the authors note, the overall boost would be larger.
Placements improved too, with articles landing on average 10 ranks higher than the professors’ pre-Twitter trajectories predicted. The benefits barely varied by race, gender, field, law school rank, career length, follower count or number of tweets, but they were bigger for professors who used Twitter to promote their own research.
Checks and caveats
The authors flag an upward trend in citations starting about five years before joining, which might mean some scholars changed how they worked before signing up. Dropping the 10% of professors with the largest pre-joining jumps left the estimate at 22%. An alternative estimator put the gain as high as 40%.
They excluded Cass Sunstein, Mark Lemley and Lawrence Lessig, whose citation counts were too high to match, and professors with fewer than 30 pre-Twitter citations. The causal reading rests on the assumption that nothing else changed in scholars’ careers at the moment they joined.
The authors see both sides. Equal returns across groups fit the hope that social media widens the marketplace of ideas, while the rewards may also feed self-promotion in the academy. The effect they measured in law is larger than prior studies have found in other disciplines.
Study Details:
- Title: Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law
- Authors: Julian Nyarko, David E. Pozen
- Journal: Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis
- Publication Date: October 31, 2025
- DOI: 10.1177/2755323X251392307