The Systematic Devaluation of Legal Scholarship in Criminology and Criminal Justice

Certain bibliometrics have become important indicators of scholarly impact despite their many weaknesses. This Article presents data demonstrating the shortcomings of using citation counts and journal impact factors for law-based scholarship. Moreover, the Article argues that reliance on these flawed metrics is just one example of how scholars in criminology and criminal justice (“CCJ”) systematically devalue legal scholarship. The Article begins by offering quotations from social scientists that provide insights into the negative ways they view legal scholars and their work.

It also quotes from interviews conducted with CCJ scholars who hold a law degree and either earned or are working on a PhD in CCJ concerning their experiences with social scientists’ hostility toward their law-based work. It then presents data on the underrepresentation of legal scholars among faculty at leading programs offering the PhD in CCJ. The Article examines an array of data demonstrating the mismeasurement of citations to legal scholarship by comparing and contrasting citations to a sample of fifty articles as reported in four databases, including Hein Online, Westlaw KeyCite, Google Scholar, and Scopus. Quantitative findings concerning citation metrics are juxtaposed against the standards for tenure and promotion in a leading CCJ program.

Those comparisons are supplemented by the perspectives of scholars who do interdisciplinary legal work at other doctoral-granting CCJ programs. The Article concludes by offering suggestions for mitigating the systematic devaluation of legal scholar.