Re‐Ranking the Top Female Academic “Stars” in Criminology and Criminal Justice Using an Alternative Method: A Research Note

Abstract

This study sought to re‐rank the top female academic “stars” in criminology and criminal justice that were identified by a previous study. Using a new software program called Harzing Publish or Perish, the results identified Robin S. Engel as the top ranked female “star” based on her total number of citations and her overall h‐index. Nicole L. Piquero, Angela R. Gover, and Jean M. McGloin also were consistently ranked in the top five across a host of indexes that adjust for age of publication, number of co‐authors, and highly cited works. Furthermore, the results were largely similar to a previous study, although some scholars did move up in the rankings using the new method employed in this study, particularly Angela R. Gover and Lois J. Presser. Study limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

Notes

1. Jodi Lane was the only scholar from Rice et al.’s (2007) list who was not able to be re‐ranked in the current study using the Harzing Publish or Perish software. The main reason why she was not included was a software limitation and a result of her having a “common” author name. For instance, there were numerous scholars with the name “J. Lane” and hundreds of scholars with the last name “Lane.” Furthermore, the Harzing Publish or Perish software defaults to only include the first 1,000 citations/publications found, so the extent of how many more citations exist to sort through over 1,000 is unknown. Even after limiting the time frame of publishing and excluding certain scholar names (e.g., E. Lane, S. Lane, etc.), the software was still unavailable to identify Jodi Lane’s citations/publications with any degree of accuracy.