Professor Janet Sinder Awarded Top Prize for Article by American Association of Law Libraries

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) awarded Janet Sinder, Director of the Library and Professor of Law, the top prize in the AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers in the open category. The competition recognizes the best papers on any subject relevant to law librarianship, both scholarly and practical. This is the second time Sinder has received the award, having previously been recognized in 1997.

In “Correcting the Record: Law Journals and Scholarly Integrity in the Digital Age,” Sinder investigates the problems caused by the lack of transparency and standard practices in revisions made to articles in legal journals after publication. This creates a situation in which multiple versions of an article can co-exist online, and reveals a failure to note that errors, and even plagiarism, were discovered after publication. Sinder suggests policies and practices law journals should adopt to preserve the integrity of the scholarship they publish, and ways they could work together to provide a uniform solution.

“I’m very excited and honored to have won this award again, more than 20 years later,” said Sinder. “The problems I discovered during my research were surprising to me, and I think they will surprise a lot of readers who rely on the integrity of the articles they are using in their research. Now that we are aware of the issue of inconsistent and unpublicized post-publication corrections in law reviews, the journals can work together to create a system to solve it.”

Her initial win was for her paper “Irish Legal History: An Overview and Guide to the Sources,” a revised version of which was published in 93 Law Library Journal 231 (2001). Her most recent article, “The Effects of Demand-Driven Acquisitions on Law Library Collection Development,” 108 Law Library Journal 155 (2016), won the Law Library Journal Article of the Year.

Sinder joined the faculty in 2012 as the Director of the Brooklyn Law School Library. Her professional interests include the intersection of library services and information technology, copyright, journal open-access issues, as well as legal history. At the Law School, she has led the library’s transition away from print materials to electronic resources, including the addition of a significant number of e-books. An active member of the AALL, she served as the editor of Law Library Journal, the association’s official journal, from 2007 to 2013. In 2014, the AALL awarded her with the 2014 Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarianship.

Sinder’s award-winning paper can be found on SSRN.