The utility of citation-based quality assessments

Abstract

The article I wrote with Matthew J. Bronick for this journal in 1984 assessing the quality of doctoral programs in deviance, criminology, and criminal justice is criticized by Lawrence F. Travis in the present issue. The Travis critique focuses on two primary concerns. First, he raises a series of objections to the use of citation-based measures of the caliber of faculty, contending that assessments of quality ought to be qualitative in nature. Second, he criticizes our use of sociology-based doctoral programs as a standard of comparison for evaluating independent doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice. Although Professor Travis makes some valid points regarding the limitations of all measures that social scientists have available to them currently, I remain convinced of the validity of my 1984 findings and am confident that citation-based measures remain a useful indicator of the quality of faculty research. I think that the comparison with sociology also remains valid; although criminology is developing rapidly as an independent field, the vast majority of active criminologists today were trained in sociology and retain ties to that discipline.