Identifying the mostcited authors helps to identify the most influential scholars and topics during a particular time period, and thus helps to document the historical development of criminology and criminal justice.
Research has shown that citation counts are strongly correlated with other measures of scholarly prestige, such as peer ratings of eminence in psychology , peer ratings of departmental prestige , receipt of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and election as president of the American Psychological Association , receipt of a Nobel Prize , numbers of publications , and even earnings . The use of citation analysis to measure the prestige and influence of individual scholars has become an accepted technique, and there have been a large number of citation analyses designed to determine the most influential scholars and works in criminology and criminal justice .
PREVIOUS CITATION RESEARCH
This article builds on previous citation research investigating the most-cited scholars in a small number of major American and international CCJ journals. For 1986-90, the mostcited scholars in three major American criminology journals ( Criminology -CRIM, Journal of Quantitative Criminology -JQC, and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency -JRCD) and three major criminal justice journals ( Justice Quarterly -JQ, Journal of Criminal Justice -JCJ, and Criminal Justice and Behavior -CJB) were determined . The choice of these journals as the major ones in CCJ was discussed in some detail and justified. The most-cited scholars were Marvin E. Wolfgang, Michael J. Hindelang, Travis Hirschi, and Alfred Blumstein.
Wolfgang's most-cited works were "Delinquency in a Birth Cohort" in criminology journals and "The Subculture of Violence" and "Patterns in Criminal Homicide" in criminal justice journals. Hindelang's most-cited work was "Measuring Delinquency" in both criminology and criminal justice journals. Hirschi's most-cited work was "Causes of Delinquency" (Hirschi, 1969) in both types of journals. Blumstein's mostcited works were "Criminal Careers and 'Career Criminals'" in criminology journals and "Research on Sentencing" in criminal justice journals.
In order to investigate changes in influence over time, this research was repeated for 1991-95, using the same six journals . The most-cited scholars during the second time period were Travis Hirschi, Michael R. Gottfredson, Robert J. Sampson, and Alfred Blumstein. Hirschi's most-cited work was again "Causes of Delinquency" (Hirschi, 1969) in both types of journals, while Gottfredson's most-cited work in both categories of journals was "A General Theory of Crime" ). Sampson's most-cited work was "Crime in the Making" in criminology journals and "Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness and Family Disruption" in criminal justice journals. Blumstein's mostcited work was "Criminal Careers and 'Career Criminals'" in both categories of journals.
This follow-up study showed the phenomenal advance in Sampson's citations between 1986-90 (when he was the forty-second mostcited scholar) and 1991-95 (when he was the third most-cited). On the other hand, Wolfgang declined from being the most-cited scholar in 1986-90 to the tenth most-cited in 1991-95, and Hindelang declined from being the second most-cited scholar in 1986-90 to the thirteenth most-cited in 1991-95. Hirschi and Blumstein were among the four most-cited scholars in both time periods. The most-cited works of the mostcited scholars were primarily theoretical or on longitudinal/criminal career research, showing the perceived importance of the criminal career paradigm during these time periods.