Who gets the ink? A page-coverage analysis of the most influential scholars in criminology and criminal justice journals

Abstract

A study of criminology textbooks recently proposed an alternative to citation analysis as a measurement of the influence of scholars. Drawing on techniques developed in content analysis, the study used inches-of-print and pages devoted to scholars to assess their influence.
This paper extends the page-coverage technique to an analysis of six leading criminology and criminal justice journals published from 1991 to 1995. The 100 most influential scholars in the journals are reported, as measured in page-coverage. A comparison of these findings to a recent study listing the most-cited scholars in the same journals for the same
years showed some interesting differences in the rival procedures. Specifically, the citation analysis seemed to underestimate the influence of earlier theorists and scholars known mostly for one work, while perhaps overestimating the influence of prolific contemporary quantitative
researchers. Because these findings are similar to the ones reported in the earlier comparison of citation and page-coverage techniques in textbooks, page-coverage measurement appears to be an important alternative to citations in evaluating the influence of scholars.