The Invisible Scholar: Authors of Legal Scholarship in Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals

Abstract

This study assesses the authorship of legal scholarship within 20 criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) journals from 2005 to 2015, examining trends over time and variation across journals in the prevalence of sole-authorship and the mean number of authors and identifying the most prolific authors of legal scholarship published in CCJ journals. The study thus sheds light on the extent of collaboration among CCJ legal scholars and identifies CCJ legal scholars who have remained largely invisible due to their focus on a marginalized subfield.

Notes

¹ While there are a select few legal scholars who are well known, often their prominence arises from textbook publications, stature within professional organizations, and publishing journal articles on a variety of CCJ topics in addition to publishing legal scholarship.

² CCJLS was formerly known as Western Criminology Review.

³ Due to the focus of the present study being on authorship of legal scholarship within CCJ journals, the methodology does not capture CCJ legal scholars who publish primarily in law reviews, which is increasingly common due to the marginalization of legal scholarship within CCJ journals.

⁴ The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Law and Public Policy Section recently adopted as its official journal The Journal of Criminal Justice and Law: A Publication of the Law and Public Policy Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. While this is certainly a positive development, given the vast underrepresentation of legal scholarship in CCJ journals (Rowe et al., 2017), the founding of additional journals receptive to legal scholarship, as well as efforts to encourage editors of existing journals to be more open to publishing legal scholarship, is still warranted.

⁵ Authors of legal scholarship often face desk rejections and peer reviews indicating that legal scholarship does not fit within the scope of the journal and would be more appropriate for a law review (Hemmens, 2015b, 2016). This devaluation of legal scholarship may be in part due to the lack of required legal scholarship courses in CCJ PhD programs (Hemmens, 2015a, 2016), which leads to misunderstandings about the nature of legal research among those programs’ graduates (Nolasco et al., 2010).

⁶ CCJ legal scholars are increasingly relegated to publishing in law reviews due to the lack of receptiveness to legal scholarship exhibited by CCJ journal editors and peer reviewers (Hemmens, 2015b, 2016). This is problematic because law review publications, which are often not peer reviewed, may be treated as inferior during evaluations for promotion and tenure (Hemmens, 2015b, 2016). Ironically, some law reviews have higher impact factors than highly ranked CCJ journals do. Unfortunately, when CCJ legal scholars publish in law reviews due to editors’ feedback indicating that legal scholarship belongs in law reviews (Hemmens, 2015b, 2016), CCJ legal scholars become marginalized within the CCJ discipline.