Beyond Citation Counts: Reassessing Top Criminologists’ “Influence” With Altmetric Scores

Abstract

Criminal justice and criminology (CCJ), like many academic disciplines, conducts its share of rankings. Citation-based ranks of individual scholars are particularly popular, and they tend to consistently identify the field’s supposedly “top” scholars and “academic stars.” Whether citations equate with “influence,” however, is up for debate. At the least, citation-based metrics are unidimensional and fail to capture attention outside academia. Accordingly, we drew on the work of Cohn et al. and re-ranked top-cited scholars using the Google Chrome “Altmetric it!” bookmarklet. As expected, the Altmetrics methodology fundamentally altered past rankings. The most influential scholars in our rankings, Terrie E. Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, received higher Altmetric scores than all the remaining ranked scholars combined.