Part of the "good reason" that it is the number one downloaded paper is "the rich get richer" phenomena[1][2] and that it is a paper that is related to online/internet legal scholarship. It is certainly a great paper but most downloaded paper is not a sign that it is the pinnacle of legal scholarship. A recent article about the most cited legal papers of all time had this to say:
"With the proliferation of services available for faculty to share their
scholarship online, “download” or “view” counts have also become a domi-
nant marker of “impact,” particular ly download counts from subject
and institutional repositories. (Some full-text research databases and
other com- mercial services have begun to refl ect usage statistics in
their products. This type of metric differs significantly from citation
metrics: it is really a measurement of the “popularity” or visi bility
of the article, noting whether an abstract was viewed or visited and
whether a link was clicked rather than whether the paper was actually
read, thought well of, and used.
...
The top downloaded paper of all time on SSRN as of the writing of this
Article appears on none of Shapiro’s lists. 81 Furthermore, only one
paper on Shapiro’s all-time top 100 list in Table I or recent-articles
list in Table II appears in SSRN’s top 100 downloaded papers ( Property,
Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark A. Lemley). Of the top
100 downloaded law authors in SSRN, only 15 are on any of Shapiro’s
lists. Looking at the au- thors listed in the recent-articles lis t in
Table II, the author’s most downloaded paper of all time appears in this
list only approximately half the time. It is clear that while arguably a
metric in and of itself, being a top downloaded paper in SSRN does not
equate with being a top-cited paper of all time. One could argue that an
artic le’s presence in newer cited-reference services might potentially
provide a new metric, but as with other metrics, it is subject to the
volatility of the source content."[3]
My use of an ellipsis was to indicate that I cut some material from the quote. I do not understand why you quoted "..." My comment had to do with the reason why it is the number one downloaded paper.
"..." is a convention I first found in manga, which indicates a character has no (immediate) verbal reply to what was just previously said or happened.
Now that you updated the definition it makes a little more sense, but not a lot more since HN is not a creative writing assignment. It was unclear given your initial reply:
"..." would be a quote, albeit an entirely weird one.
"..." is a convention I first found in manga, which indicates a character has no verbal reply to what was previously just said.
Yeah, my initial reply failed in a sense because there's no distinction between italicized and plain periods. The first that you quote above was entered as double quote star dot dot dot star double quote, but rendered the same as the second without the stars (asterisks).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
[3] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/110/8/Shapiro_a...