And more than professors in other disciplines. So says a recent paper from Julian Nyarko (Stanford Law School) and David Pozen (Columbia University – Law School) using a dataset from the website formerly known as Twitter. Here’s the abstract: 
Social Media Participation and Scholarly Success in Law
Stanford Public Law Working Paper Forthcoming
Columbia Public Law Research Paper Forthcoming
33 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2025 Last revised: 22 Jul 2025
Stanford Law School
Columbia University – Law School
Date Written: July 21, 2025
Abstract
A growing body of research has explored the impact of social media activity on citation counts in the natural and social sciences. Using a novel dataset on Twitter activity by U.S. law professors as well as a novel corpus of law journal articles, we extend this research to legal scholarship. We find that joining Twitter increases citation counts by an average of 22% per year and improves article placements by up to 10 ranks for law professors, relative to a synthetic control group. These positive returns apply across nearly all classes of scholars and are magnified for those who post frequently about their own work. The identified citation boost would be even larger than 22% if it were not partially offset by a decline in citations to articles published pre-Twitter. Overall, our results suggest that social media participation yields concrete benefits in the legal academy — indeed, benefits outstripping those that prior studies have identified in other disciplines — along with a number of potential downsides.
The data predates the “great exodus” of law professors from X, as acknowledged in the conclusion:
This is the first study to investigate the effects of social media on scholarly impact indicators in law. Using a synthetic control methodology that constructs counterfactual versions of law professors who joined Twitter, we show that participation on the platform significantly increased citation counts and improved article placements. In many fields, “there is no detectable citation bump” from Twitter activity (Branch et al. 2024, p. 1). In law, this bump is not only detectable but also strikingly large and broadly distributed across the professoriate. It remains to be seen whether these results will hold up now that Twitter has become X or whether, instead, they will come to be understood as capturing as a unique phase in the evolution of the legal academy: the period in the early 2000s when social media activity drove scholarly success to an extraordinary degree.
Download it here.