On Tuesday, October 13, 2026, I gave a 15 minute presentation entitled, Authors Cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, April 2021–April 2026 at the Law Via the Internet conference that was held this week in Montreal.
My talk described the methodology of project that I’ve recently finished and its results. That project was the collecting and counting the citations made by the Supreme Court of Canada over a five year period to determine, in part, what were the most cited law reviews, articles, monographs, and dictionaries cited by the court during this time.
I began my talk with a brief literature review, and introduced the audience to the first article that had quantified the citations of the Supreme Court of Canada for insight and analysis: Vaughan Black and Nicholas Richter’s “Did She Mention My Name?: Citation of Academic Authority by the Supreme Court of Canada, 1985-1990” (1993) 16:2 Dal LJ 377.
“Did She Mention My Name?” has got to be a reference to the Gordon Lightfoot song and title of his third album. As an aside, the SCC has indeed mentioned Gordon Meredith Lightfoot’s name.
My own project follows the 2022 work, “The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time by the Supreme Court of Canada” by Yan Campagnolo and Camille Andrzejewski that collected and counted the works cited by the SCC from 8 April 1875 and 16 April 2021. Their paper puts forward that there are three methods that legal scholars typically use to generate lists of important works. The method that they opted to use —and the one that I also employed— is the judicial citation method: which is “counting the number of times an article is cited by the courts within a given time frame to assess an article’s impact on the development of the law”.
Of note, there is a significant difference in our respective approaches to scope as Yan and Camille limit their citation sources to “generalist, peer-reviewed, and university-based law reviews that were created in or before 1982.”
Campagnolo and Andrzejewski did not provide the technical details of how they created their tables of data in their paper. They state that the “data was collected from the English search engine available on Lexum — the database in which the Supreme Court publishes its decisions.” But I was unable to replicate how they did this data collection using Lexum’s search interface. Perhaps they used research assistants to find each case and then search from within each case? Or perhaps they had offline access to the entire corpus for analysis.
I did not use research assistants for this project. Instead, I collected all of the data manually using Zotero, OpenRefine, and Kerko.
For those unfamiliar with the SCC reporting of decisions, most judgements will list the cases cited, the legislation cited, and sometimes (but not always) the authors cited of other works. These are listed as citations in plain text with no external links.
The image above is an Authors Cited section of a SCC decision on CanLII. Even though the highlighted citation is available on CanLII, there is no link generated because CanLII does not parse for this kind of text. At least, not yet. The day after I spoke, Isabela Pocovnicu of Lexum presented work “Towards an LLM-Powered Citator for Secondary Material.” Lexum is trying to automate this work with Ai. They have made progress but dealing with the variety of forms that secondary material can take, has proven to be challenging.
To create my database of Authors Cited works, I manually searched for the source of each citation on the internet, and added a bibliographic record each item into a dedicated Zotero collection. The screenshot above demonstrates this work in action.
If you are unfamiliar with Zotero, it is free software that is used by faculty, researchers, and students from around the world to capture citations to generate bibliographies or to create collections of research for future reading and annotation. If you are interested in learning more, I have a blog post in which I have shared How I Use Zotero (and Why.)
The image above is a view of the bibliographic record of the work featured on the previous screen from within my Zotero database on my laptop. You can see that in this example, 2026 SCC 23 cites a fair number of books and articles of legal scholarship.
For this project, I am using Zotero to create a local database that contains all the citations of the SCC for a five year period, for analysis. Zotero is an SQLite database that is able to export citations as tabular data into a variety of different formats.
But I am also making the these once-static text-files available for others to use, as structured text. This is something that those maintaining the Lexum platform could choose to provide to make available themselves, if they opt to add hidden citation name fields in the SPAN HTML tags of the works cited, using COinS metadata.
My database of Authors Cited works by the SCC is already publicly available on Zotero.org at https://www.zotero.org/groups/6078133/scc-authors-cited/library. If you are using Zotero, you can go to this site and download all of the structured metadata that you’d like. This database is not only of the period of April 2021 to April 2026 as I have continued to add to the collection.
I also have published this same database using a more user-friendly
interface called Kerko. To set this up, I had help from the good people at Reclaim Hosting, who also hosts this site via reclaim.cloud at: https://authors-cited.ca.reclaim.cloud/bibliography/.
When I add new citations to my Zotero database, it is set up so that the Kerko website will automatically update shortly thereafter. Kerko makes the collection of citations more of a browse-able database that lends itself better to search and discovery.
The other software I used in this project was OpenRefine. OpenRefine is
community-supported open software that exists to help people clean and
better understand large datasets.
For this project, I used OpenRefine to make sure that I normalized all the journal names, so that, for example, “Canadian Bar Review” and “The Canadian Bar Review” would be combined into the one name.
Over the five year period studied, there were 972 articles found in the Authors Works section. In the screenshot above you can see how OpenRefine listed them by the facet of publication title, sorted by count.
The Results
From, “Authors Cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, April 2021–April 2026”, the most cited serial publication is… The Canadian Bar Review!
Below is the rest of list:
It is my intention to continue tracking and counting SCC citations and I hope to share end-of-year statistics, going forward.
The 2022 “Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time by the Supreme Court of Canada” also counted and listed the most cited articles of all time, although it must be noted that they only counted citations from university journal presses. The most cited article from their dataset was cited 8 times.
The above is an excerpt of a table of the most cited articles by the SCC from April 2021 to April 2026, with the most cited article being: Honourable Justice Malcolm Rowe and Leanna Katz’s A Practical Guide to Stare Decisis. In: Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues. 2020 ; Vol. 41. pp. 1-27.
Another article that explores the citation patterns of the SCC is Peter McCormick’s The Judges and Journals, which goes into much depth over a 20-period that ends in 2004.
In his paper, author Peter McCormick looks for relationships between the number of citations and when a case was published. In the first table above, he breaks down the number of citations by each particular SCC Court, as defined by its chief justice. McCormick also lists the cases with the most number of citations.
For my own project, I have not gone into this type of content analysis. But, because it was easy to do so, I did generate a graph of the number of citations across the axis of the date of the case decision, just to see if there were any trends that the eye could spot. To my eye, there’s only one real anomaly: the 98 citations found in the Authors Cited section of Dickson v. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (2024 SCC 10).
I also generated this list of the most cited dictionaries over the five years. I think the most surprising thing to me is that the Canadian Oxford Dictionary
is so highly cited especially as it hasn’t been revised since 2005.
I will say that this table that presents the most cited books by the SCC over the last five years took the most time to create, largely because there are so many more titles to normalize. As well, it isn’t always clear how to count titles that are continually published or published as a new edition every year.
But despite the fuzziness of this particular dataset, there is a set of books that can be confidently said to be routinely cited by the SCC again and again, namely:
- Ruth Sullivan’s Construction of Statues, 7th edition (2022)
- Peter Hogg and Wade Wright’s Constitutional Law in Canada (2007)
- Pierre-André Côté and Mathieu Devinat’s Interprétation des lois (2021)
I have made this dataset of citations available openly for others with hopes that it will support their legal scholarship. Perhaps it might prove useful as a benchmark to test the citation-identification abilities of an Ai-enhanced citator.
But the primary reason why I created this database (again, available at https://authors-cited.ca.reclaim.cloud/bibliography/) was to demonstrate that librarians can (and should) create new sources of scholarship built on the authority work that we have always engaged in as a profession.