Fishing for downloads

Orin Kerr writes about somebody who asked his friends to download his article so he could use the download statistic to get the article accepted.  Christine links to the post and writes:

I'm still living by advice from Eugene Volokh that's 18 months old not to post on ssrn until I have an offer from a law review.  Never did it occur to me to post first, send out later.

A few points. First, this advice from Eugene that Christine cites is surprising.  SSRN is a valuable way to circulate writing for scholarly feedback before “permanent” publication in print. As one of the initial users of SSRN, I always understood that to be a main benefit of the service.  SSRN thus clearly distinguishes between “accepted” and “working” papers. I hope no norms develop against this practice.

Second, what if the emailer had simply sent the link to his friends and asked for comments?  How, exactly, does it differ from publcizing one's work through a blog? Is the only problem here that the email writer was just obtuse in the way he explained his request?

Third, with respect to the blogger example, is there something wrong with this?  Note that you don’t get wide readership just by publishing your blog.  People have to find it interesting.  Then they download your stuff because they assume from the blog that they’ll find this interesting too. Any problem?  If not, what if, instead of publication, you use the “push” medium of email. Why is this different?

Fourth, as suspect as the email seemed, how big a deal is it?  Do law reviews actually look at downloads?  Assuming they do, what do they think is an impressive statistic?  Note that SSRN disciplines repeated downloads from the same address.  So to make an impressive showing in this way, one would need (1) hundreds of very close friends; or (2) lots of acquaintances who thought your work deserved recognition.

I’m not condoning this particular email message, but I think we need to be careful to define what norms were being violated.

Comments

[current editor]

FWIW, SSRN downloads are a consideration in article selection in my mind.