Crime and Violence Studies in the Immigration Field: Interactions between Disciplines and Emerging Concepts

Abstract

This paper uses bibliometric analysis to evaluate the literature on immigration, crime, and violence to find out how these concepts are studied across disciplines. The paper gave specific attention to the field of Criminology to demonstrate the variation of the use of these concepts in the literature and how much it differs from other disciplines. To meet these expectations, we examined how journals are categorized based on covering how immigration and crime interact in social science disciplines. Moreover, the analysis maps how research articles interact in different journals and what types of topics receive the most attention among researchers by looking at cross-citation data and keyword selection. The findings show that, overall, the number of publications used at least one of the studied items (immigration, crime, and violence) as a keyword increased tremendously in the last two decades. The most studied concept amongst all disciplines is violence, followed by gender and crime with the combination of migration, immigration, immigrants. The topic has been mostly studied from the ‘receiving country’ perspective and funding leads to an increase in publications. The findings suggest Criminology is the top field producing most of the studies in the field followed by public health-related research. These findings suggest that migration, when it is connected to crime and violence, is considered an individual- and social-level challenge requiring the attention of experts in understanding criminal and deviant behavior as well as experts from public health.