Law Doesn't Count? Measuring Bibliometric Coverage of German Law Journals
 

No. 2025-10

English Abstract: 

Bibliometric analyses are uncommon in German legal scholarship, a fact often attributed to disciplinary skepticism. However, this paper posits that a more fundamental reason is the lack of adequate data coverage in standard bibliometric databases. We systematically investigate the representation of the German law journal landscape in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and OpenAlex. To achieve this, we establish a benchmark set of 51 representative German law journals based on a 2009 expert survey. We then measure the coverage of these journals within the target databases and assess the quality of the available metadata, focusing particularly on OpenAlex due to its superior initial coverage. Our findings confirm the initial hypothesis: coverage in WoS and Scopus is minimal. While OpenAlex includes a larger proportion of the journals from the benchmark set (32/51) and shows reasonable item-level completeness for a subset checked against publisher data, its metadata quality presents significant limitations. Crucially, affiliation data is sparse, and citation data is almost entirely absent, precluding meaningful citation analysis, impact assessment, or reliable institutional evaluation. We conclude that while coverage is improving, particularly through open platforms like OpenAlex, the current state of bibliometric data, especially the lack of citation information, severely restricts the application of standard bibliometric methods to German legal scholarship. We discuss potential reasons for this gap and suggest focusing on enhancing open data repositories and exploring new methods to generate currently unavailable citation data.