An assessment of the relative impact of criminal justice and criminology journals

The current study was undertaken to provide an impact assessment of criminal justice and criminology journals as an alternative measure to the prestige survey ratings reported by Sorensen, Snell, and Rodriguez (2006). Citations to sixty-seven target journals were tallied from ten top criminal justice and criminology journals. Various impact measures were fairly consistent with one another and the prestige survey ratings, particularly for a “top tier” of journals. With a couple of notable exceptions, a long-standing core of these elite journals has held their relative positions from early impact studies relying on data from the 1970s and 1980s; nevertheless, significant deviations were noted based on the measurement utilized for all but the top journals. Findings from the current study suggested that the quality of journals is multifaceted and warns against employing a scale based on one dimension of journal quality.