NCJ Number
228933
Journal
Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 37 Issue: 5 Dated: September-October 2009 Pages: 505-511
Date Published
October 2009
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This study conducted an impact assessment of criminal justice and criminology (CJC) journals as an alternative measure to the prestige survey ratings reported by Sorensen, Snell, and Rodriquez (2006).
Abstract
The study found that, overall, the leading CJC journals operate according to well-known standards with solid institutional backing, boards of editors of national renown, and long-standing reputations for publishing high-quality work in the field. This "top tier" of elite journals tends to perform well in prestige surveys and impact studies, with only slight deviations that result from the selection of particular measures. In addition to the elite set of CJC journals, there is a group of well-known second-tier general, regional, and specialized journals with editors and board members who perform excellent peer review and procurement of quality articles. Rating of these journals fluctuate a bit more than is the case with the elite journals, depending on the selection of measures. The proliferation of CJC journals has made it difficult to monitor newcomers to the discipline. They have not been around long enough to calculate their impact. Two other types of journals for which rankings are complex and for which citation analyses do not work well are niche journals and non-CJC journals. These journals publish within a circumscribed area of research. The study indicates that one particular measure of a journal, such as a prestige rating or an impact measure alone, may not be adequate to capture the relative positions for all but the top CJC journals. This study used the top tier of journals as the source of journal citations to be searched for the year 2007. Citations to 67 target journals were tallied from 10 top CJC journals. 4 tables, 1 figure, 13 notes, and 25 references