The Use of Scientific Inscriptions in Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals: An Analysis of Publication Trends between 1985 and 2009

Abstract

The hierarchy of sciences distinguishes social sciences as “softer” than natural sciences as the latter place more emphasis on non-inferential strategies (i.e. scientific inscriptions). As a social science, criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) has struggled to integrate its analytical and experimental constituencies, hindering its research record. One solution is to embrace inscription techniques that “hard” sciences use to cumulate knowledge. The use of scientific inscriptions in 397 randomly selected articles published between 1985 and 2009 in 16 CCJ journals was compared with that of other scientific disciplines. Less than 10% of page space was devoted to data presentation (i.e. graphs plus tables) with no evidence of variation across the 25-year study period. Relative to other sciences, inscription usage in CCJ journals fell between psychology and sociology. Researchers are advised that the inclusion of inscriptions may aid in the transfer of experimental results to applied settings.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Zöel Vautour, B.A., and Jacob Baisley, B.A., for their assistance with the literature retrieval and data coding portions of the study. We would also like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript.

Notes

¹ This antipathy between analytical and experimental criminology is exemplified by Fox’s (2010) recounting of the birth pangs of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 1983, at which time 100 of the day’s leading criminologists suggested that such a journal “would never fly” (p. 417). In the present study, JQC was nominated by 10 of the 17 reviews of journal prestige and it ranked 4th (out of 16) in both graph and table usage. This compares favorably with what Fox (2010) labels the “big boys” (p. 418) in the field, such as Criminology (ranked 7th in graph usage and 9th in table usage), Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (ranked 10th in graph usage and 7th in table usage), and Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (ranked 16th in both graph and table usage).

² Some of the tension between the analytical and experimental factions may be attributed to the rapid growth of CCJ programs in the USA during the latter half of the twentieth century. Between the mid-1960s and early 1990s, the numbers of undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the field mushroomed, outstripping the growth of similar programs in sociology, regarded by many as criminology’s natural home (Tifft, Maruna, & Elliott, 2006; Wrede & Featherstone, 2012) and “mother discipline” (Savelsberg & Sampson, 2002, p. 100).

³ See Fidler, Thomason, Cumming, Finch, and Leeman (2004) for an account of the difficulties inherent in attempting to affect a wholesale culture shift in the reporting of results in medicine.