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The launch of an Educational Impact and Evaluation Research Special Topic Hub
SSRN has launched a new hub for the month of April, in line with the UN Goal for the month of Quality Education. The Special Topic Hub on Educational Impact & Evaluation Research offers a curated view into early stage research tackling educational initiatives and their effects on students’ achievements.
The hub encompasses research on the assessment of educational plans, methodologies, and interventions, along with examining how academic research influences procedures and schemes.
This specialized hub provides perspectives from diverse fields that could contribute to the ongoing dialogue regarding methods to comprehend student education and facilitate the achievements of both students and educators.
You can find the homepage for all of SSRN’s Special Topic Hubs here.
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Five of the most downloaded law papers posted on SSRN in 2023
It’s time for a round up of 2023! We’ve been thinking about which are some of the hottest papers across different networks at SSRN, and what sort of topics they cover.
First up is our Legal Scholarship Network (LSN). We’ve picked out five of the papers with the most downloads, and noted the focus on the interaction of AI and law, and how ChatGPT might affect law education going forward. We’ve included some in our selection, as well as a few others on various law topics. Check out the papers below!
Jonathan H. Choi, Kristin E. Hickman, Amy Monahan, Daniel Schwarcz
How well can AI models perform on law school exams without human assistance? The abstract discusses a study where an AI model, ChatGPT, was used to write answers for law school exams at the University of Minnesota. The results showed that ChatGPT performed at the level of a C+ student, obtaining passing grades in all four courses, and the implications for legal education and writing are discussed, along with advice on how ChatGPT can assist in legal writing.
The Sweep and Force of Section Three
William Baude, Michael Stokes Paulsen
Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits former officeholders from holding office if they participate in insurrection or rebellion, but this article argues that its full legal impact has been overlooked. This article clarifies that Section Three is still valid, immediately disqualifies individuals from office without needing Congress’ action, supersedes prior constitutional rules, and could disqualify former President Donald Trump and others involved in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
AI Tools for Lawyers: A Practical Guide
Daniel Schwarcz, Jonathan H. Choi
This article offers advice to lawyers and law students on how to use advanced AI models like GPT-4 in legal research and writing. It suggests that by applying traditional legal skills to refine and verify AI-generated legal analysis, individuals can turn these models into valuable personal legal assistants.
Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Joshua Mitts
Recent research shows that traders are disguising their trades in certain types of financial assets like ETFs. By examining the behavior of financial markets during military conflicts, the study finds a significant increase in short selling in Israeli-company ETFs just before the October 7 Hamas attack. This suggests that some traders may have had advance knowledge of the attack and profited from it, highlighting gaps in enforcement of laws against insider trading.
Daniel Martin Katz, Michael James Bommarito, Shang Gao, Pablo Arredondo
This paper tests the performance of an early version of GPT-4 on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), which includes multiple-choice questions and open-ended essays. GPT-4 shows significant improvement over previous models, scoring higher than human test-takers in some areas and surpassing the passing threshold for all UBE jurisdictions, suggesting its potential in supporting legal services.
You can read all of our papers on the Legal Scholarship Research Network here.
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ORCIDs From Amsterdam…
Last week SSRN’s CEO Gregg Gordon joined the rest of the ORCID leadership team for the ORCID Board meeting in Amsterdam, and also hosted a meeting between ORCID and Elsevier at the company HQ in Amsterdam’s Radarweg office.
If you’re not familiar with ORCID’s work, ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a global, not-for-profit organisation supported by fees from organisations such as Elsevier in the scholarly communications space. It’s community-built and governed by a board of directors designed to represent a wide range of stakeholders who care about identity in scholarship. Gregg joined the board last year and will serve until the end of 2025.
A small group in person in the office and a much larger group online via Zoom were able to hear the latest news from the ORCID team in a session hosted by former Elsevier tech guru Chris Shillum, who now leads ORCID as Executive Director. The team shared ORCID’s vision to establish a unique identifier for people who contribute to the scholarly record, so that their work can be correctly connected to their contributions “across disciplines, borders, and time.”
ORCID tries to do this by providing three pieces of infrastructure for scholarship: The first is the ORCID identifier itself, which is a unique free-of- charge ID for researchers. The second is the ORCID profile which is a digital CV for scholars, allowing them to share details of their employment, education, funding, and other metadata with the rest of the world. Finally ORCID has a set of APIs to enable interoperability between an ORCID record and ORCID’s member organisations.
In the presentation at Elsevier, Chris and the team shared ORCID’s strategic priorities for this year, which include increasing the value it offers to member and researchers, getting more people to participate with ORCID, and a new goal around upholding trust which aims to address the current crisis in scholarly integrity.
The team fielded lots of questions from different Elsevier folks keen to learn more about their work and how we can best support ORCID in our products and it was nice to see Chris back on familiar turf, as it’s several years since he was last in the Elsevier office.
You can learn more about ORCID’s work here, and below you can see the ORCID Board braving a particuarly cold February day before the board meeting – Gregg needed that scarf… -
SSRN and the Financial Times on the Impact of Academic Research
SSRN has again collaborated with the Financial Times, this time to provide data on the impact of business school academics’ research.
SSRN provided the FT with information to identify popular business school research papers by the download counts from ‘practitioners’. In this case, this means downloads by users in positions of influence, including users from commercial and central banks, regulators and local and national government agencies.
You can read the whole report by the FT here, which includes a summary of the most downloaded business school papers.
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Announcing New Article Page Branding for Research Paper Series
SSRN is thrilled to announce a new feature for Research Paper Series (RPS). The innovative release applies institutional branding to every article page associated with papers of a Research Paper Series, allowing authors and institutions to better highlight their work.
What’s this about?
A Research Paper Series promotes the research output of authors from an institution, for example George Mason, collected nicely together on a customized landing page. A Research Paper Series will often focus on a specific part of an institution, such as a law school, business school, and a department within a corporation. Applying institutional branding on all articles included in a Research Paper Series strengthens the presence of an institution and underscores an author’s work.
Why Have we Made this Change?
Institutionally branded article pages enable discovery of a Research Paper Series on SSRN more easily than ever before. Prior to this new feature, an author’s participation in a Research Paper Series was noticeable through a clickable series identifier found under the paper title on the article page. With this new release, the institutional branding for all authors of a paper (displaying up to four different RPS branding, ordered alphabetically) will appear at the top of the article page, linking back to the associated Research Paper Series. It’s an excellent mechanism for authors to emphasize their affiliation as well as creating a more visible and interconnected scholarly network.
“We’re really excited to make this change to provide more value to our RPS customers – we’re very proud to showcase their support for so much of the great research on SSRN, and we’ll continue to explore creative ways to add value to their work,” said Michael Magoulias, SSRN’s Director of Operations.
You can see an example of this new feature by clicking on a paper in the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, Law & Economics Research Paper Series.
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The release of a new submission experience
We’re thrilled to announce the release of a new submission form prototype for SSRN, and we can’t wait for you to try it out. We’ve been hard at work designing and building a new submission experience to make it easier for our users to submit their research. Your insights and feedback are invaluable to us as we work towards refining and enhancing the submission experience for all users.
Check it out!
You can try out the submission form prototype by clicking here. We’re excited for our users to try it and give us feedback. Take a look at the rest of this blog post to see what’s new, what isn’t and other important information regarding this prototype.
What’s New?
The fresh submission form comes with a sleek design and improved user interface aimed at making your experience smoother and more efficient. We’ve been hard at work to bring you a form that aligns with your needs and expectations. Some changes we’ve made:
- We’ve split the submission experience into different stages to make it more clear which information we’re asking for.
- We’ve built in an automatic extraction service, which will extract the paper title and abstract from your PDF, to save the need for copy and paste.
A Work in Progress
While we’re excited to share the new form with you, it’s important to note that it’s still a work in progress. As with any improvement, there may be a few bugs and glitches that we are actively working to address. Your patience and understanding are greatly appreciated as we fine-tune the system to deliver a seamless experience.
Functionality Update
We want to be transparent about the fact that some features from the old form are not yet integrated into the new submission system. Rest assured, we are diligently working to incorporate these functionalities to ensure a comprehensive and feature-rich experience for our users. In particular, users who are part of an RPS are not yet able to associate their paper with their series.
Our Old Form is still Live
The link on the SSRN homepage is still connected to our current submission form. In addition, if you go in to revise your paper, you’ll be using the current form as part of the revision process.
Your Feedback Matters!
Your input is crucial in helping us identify and rectify any issues that may arise during this testing phase. We encourage you to explore the new form and share your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with us. Your feedback will play a vital role in shaping the final version of the submission form.
How to Share Your Feedback
We’ve set up a dedicated email address where you can send us your thoughts: ideas@ssrn.com. Whether you encounter a bug, have a suggestion for improvement, or simply want to share your experience, we want to hear from you. Your feedback will contribute to making SSRN an even better platform for researchers and academics.
You can access the new submission form prototype here.