ABSTRACT
Wright and Soma recently published a piece in the Journal of Crime and Justice which used citation counts in American criminology textbooks as measures of cited scholars’ intellectual influence. This comment questions such use of citation not only by Wright and Soma, but others as well, including myself. Drawing from a considerable literature in the sociology of science, I address the general problems associated with using citation as a measure of intellectual influence and the particular problems found in using textbook citations for that purpose.