The influences of various disciplines on criminology, 1991–2014
Throughout its history, criminology has been influenced by many disciplines. In the early 20th century it was shaped by positivist sociology in the United States and by psychiatry in Great Britain, and later was strongly influenced by critical currents in sociology. Beginning in the 1990s, it began to take into account the viewpoints of various disciplines. This article uses citations from a group of criminology journals, mainly in English, to analyze the relative influence of those disciplines between 1991 and 2014. The analysis reveals that writing in criminology is increasingly interdisciplinary, with 65 % of articles in 2014 citing sources in more than three disciplines. In those articles, the proportion of references to the field of psychology has grown, while references to the social sciences and to law have decreased. Close examination of journal citations and author affiliations shows that 42 % of the journals studied have an interdisciplinary profile, 22 % take a socio-criminological perspective, 22 % focus on psychology, and 4 % are devoted to law. Lastly, analysis of the network of these journal’s citations reveals influences from multiple disciplines on criminology’s core publications, from journals rooted in criminology and the social sciences to interdisciplinary journals as well as those that focus on psychology.