Article Productivity among the Faculty of Criminology and Criminal Justice Doctoral Programs, 2005–2009

Abstract

One important dimension of the quality of a graduate program is the quality of its faculty. Previous assessments of the publication productivity of criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) faculties have been needlessly incomplete and narrow, reflecting publications only in a small number of CCJ journals. Assessments covering only CCJ journals fail to reflect the multi‐disciplinary nature of CCJ and bias results against programs whose most productive scholars publish in non‐CCJ journals. The present research covers the full array of major journals in which CCJ‐related research appears, by searching for articles using the multi‐disciplinary Web of Science database, as well as the Criminal Justice Periodical Index database. This article is an update of an earlier assessment that covered refereed articles published in 2000 through early 2005. The present study covers those published in 2005–2009, inclusive. Based on article counts, the most productive faculties of a CCJ doctoral program are those of Florida State University and the University of Cincinnati. The article also summarizes the changes in rankings of CCJ programs in studies covering periods from 1970 through 2009.

Notes

1. When these additional parameters were employed, two additional steps were taken to ensure complete and accurate coverage. First, WOS allows the user to run a secondary analysis on authors of specific articles. In the event that a professor was identified as an author of a publication, we were then able to run an additional check where the WOS search engine cross‐referenced the target study against the entire WOS database using citation information to produce a set of publications that may have been written by the same author. Second, in cases where a vita was available online, we cross‐referenced it with our database to ensure that no studies had been overlooked. This does not mean that we automatically entered a publication if it showed up on the vita. Rather, we then attempted to locate the specific publication in the WOS database to determine whether it had mistakenly been overlooked. Accessing the vita of the faculty member did not identify a single publication that had mistakenly been overlooked. Thus, the additional parameters are unlikely to have biased the publication counts.