Changing Influences in Criminology: Examining 45 Years of Criminology Journal Citations

Abstract

A growing body of research has recently been devoted to quantifying research productivity both on the part of individuals, as well as the prestige that individual productivity levels bring to departments. Only recently has research begun to examine what journals criminologists are most likely to cite in their scholarly research. In this study, we rank the most influential journals cited in Criminology for the years 1969–1973, 1989–1993, and 2009–2013. Our analyses suggest Criminology quickly became the most cited journal, followed by JRCD and Justice Quarterly. Furthermore, the influence of sociological journals has remained strong, but has clearly diminished over time.

Keywords:

• Citations
• journals
• citation reports
• publication productivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although all of our Tables and Figures focus on the 20 most cited journals from each time period, we examined the 50 most cited journals in the event that combining the citations of journals appearing lower than 20th would have resulted in the combined citation total ranking in the top 20.

2 We did not reanalyze the 1,000+ journals included in our study. Instead, we focused on only the 20 most cited journals from each of our three time periods. Therefore, it is possible that when controlling for the number of years in print, other journals may have made the top 20 in Table 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raymond E. Barranco

Raymond E. Barranco is an Associate Professor in Department of Sociology at Mississippi State University. His research broadly focuses on violence, race/ethnicity, and immigration. His published work has appeared in Social Forces, The Sociological Quarterly, Social Science Research, and other venues.

Ashley Perry

Ashley Perry, Ph.D., is an instructor and undergraduate coordinator teaching Criminology in the Sociology department at Mississippi State University. She earned her doctorate in Sociology from Louisiana State University with a dissertation on changing attitudes and attention to situations of intimate partner violence, particularly in cases of men's victimization. Current teaching interests include the effects of globalization on crime, and issues of mass incarceration and inequalities in the criminal justice system.

David C. May

David C. May is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Mississippi State University. He has authored or coauthored six books and over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters around his research interests of fear of crime, school safety, cybercrime, policing, corrections, military sociology, and human robot interaction. In addition to those works, Dr. May is currently a co-PI on research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center, the Henry Family Foundation, and the Department of Defense. He is active in research and service in (1) community crime prevention and school safety work, (2) work dealing with reentry and other correctional issues for both officers and inmates, and (3) cybercrime research. He is currently coauthoring books on school safety, bullying, and the school to prison pipeline and writing a variety of articles about corrections, school resource officers, and cybercrime issues.

Kristen Stives

Kristen Stives is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Auburn University at Montgomery. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialization in Criminology from Mississippi State University. Her research interests include bullying, deviance, and education in criminology and criminal justice. Current projects focus on parents’ strategies to prevent bullying, definitions of bullying, and the role of college writing centers in criminology courses.