Introduction

International research is increasingly seen as desirable because the problems of a globalised world appear to benefit from attention given to multiple contexts and the exchange of ideas across national and linguistic borders (Harzing and Metz 2013; Iefremova et al. 2016; Kim et al. 2018). For criminologists and legal scholars, the globalisation of crime and justice is perhaps the defining event of the last decades. In this context, international journals should be an appropriate forum for criminologists and criminal justice scholars from all over the world to communicate. However, given the Anglo-American dominanceFootnote 1 in social sciences (Dyachenko 2014), there are reasons to suspect that the majority of the top academic journals of criminology and criminal justice that define themselves as ‘international’ are far less international than what their titles or aims would suggest.

To validate this suspect, we have conducted a two-part study to investigate how international the leading international journals of criminology and criminal justice really are. ‘International’ means ‘relating to, or affecting two or more nations’.Footnote 2 Literally, any journal associated with two nations is as ‘international’ as one associated with all nations. We could analyse the internationality, or internationalisation, of journals according to this criterion. However, if the goal is to produce internationally valid knowledge, we may have to question the categories that support such simple accounting. Generally, when contemplating an international journal, one expects it reflects a global perspective. Therefore, we will not only explore internationality according to its strict meaning but also highlight the Anglo-American traditional alliance and the close ties within the Anglosphere, a set of English-speaking nations that share common roots in British culture and history, and today maintain close cultural, political, diplomatic and military cooperation: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK.Footnote 3 In many aspects, the US and the UK, and also the Anglosphere, constitute a very exclusive club, an English-speaking academic network with strong linkages among elite producers of knowledge that cannot exactly be defined as global.Footnote 4

Following these considerations, in our opinion, an international journal should display, at least, three basic characteristics:

  1. 1)

    An editorial staff composed of highly respected scholars from different countries and linguistic communities.

  2. 2)

    A policy of publishing high-level, international-refereed scientific articles written by a significant percentage of authors from different countries and linguistic communities.

  3. 3)

    A strong capability to attract international contributions, in particular through co-authorship involving authors from different countries.

Usually, the internationality of journals is defined as the extent to which its editors, contributors and readership are internationally diverse and its content more aligned with the concerns of the international community (Ravenides 2008; Kim et al. 2018). Many works use the first two indicators, editorial board and authorship structure.Footnote 5 However, there are at least two reasons to add another indicator. First, patterns of international collaboration contribute to determine whether there is an Anglo-American dominance and to measure journal internationality. Second, co-authorships linkages constitute latent, and often ignored, social structures between the ‘core’—here identified as Anglo-American—and the ‘periphery’ and show internal differentiation patterns within the ‘core’.

The first part of the research involves an empirical quantitative investigation of the editorial boards of ten top international journals of criminology and criminal justice. Data were gathered on the level of geographical diversity on the editorial boards, focused on editors’ current country of institutional affiliation. The involvement of the top ten journal editorial board members as authors within those top ten journals was also investigated. It was not possible to study the affiliation data of referees, as such data were not available for all the selected journals. The second part of the research is an empirical quantitative investigation of authors’ geographical diversity according to their institutional affiliation in the same journals in 2017. Data were gathered on the incidence of non-Anglo-American institutional affiliation of authors in these journals. Percentages of co-authorship linkages by countries of institutional affiliation were explored. Since one would expect an international journal to contain data from all over the world, we also analysed the country of origin for data provided in these journals. The discussion and the conclusions provide some qualitative insights to deepen understanding of the quantitative results.

Literature Review

A review of the literature suggests that this is one of the first attempts to provide some information about this topic for criminology and criminal justice.Footnote 6 Although ‘internationality’ of journals is now considered a significant quality indicator (Zitt and Bassecoulard 1998; Uzun 2004; Ravenides 2008; Dyachenko 2014), little investigation has been done in these fields. Studies on the internationality of academic journals are relatively abundant, but they are focused on other disciplines, such as film studies (Morales and Toledo 2012), geography (Gutiérrez and López-Nieva 2001; Paasi 2005; Aalbers and Rossi 2006; Bajerski 2011; Bański and Ferenc 2013), information science (Uzun 2004), international relations (Ravenides 2008; Russett and Arnold 2010; Kristensen 2012, 2015), management and business (Burgess and Shaw 2010; Ellis and Zhan 2011; Harzing and Metz 2013), marketing (Bakir et al. 2000; Cheng et al. 2003; Stremersch and Verhoef 2005; Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft 2006) or psychology (Buela Casal et al. 2006; Adair et al. 2010).

Our research relies on the standard criteria to assess journals’ internationality, valuing positively the international diversity of editors, authors and co-authorships. As we will see, the results show a deficit of diversity, especially when it is considered in relation to the broader category of the Anglosphere. There are also important differences between the journals. Given the limited size of the sample, we highlight only the most obvious magnitudes. The only works we know that address similar issues as the present paper in criminology and criminal justice are the ones by Kim et al. (2014, 2015 and 2018). However, these are studies dealing basically with thematic subfields within criminology and criminal justice, showing important differences between women specialty (Kim et al. 2018), juvenile justice (Kim et al. 2015) and policing (Kim et al. 2014). In addition, they take the US predominance as the main signal of an internationality deficit. In fact, the research done by Kim et al. highlights the need for more research in order to reach for a global and sound comparative analysis of criminology and criminal justice journals internationality, and going beyond merely national networks and borders.

The present study aims to bridge this research gap. The topic is definitely a timely one, particularly if one considers that internationalising research has become an important policy target in many non-English-speaking countries, with academics increasingly expected to publish in English-language journals other than their own national ones (Yeung 2001; Uzun 2004; Ravenides 2008; Dyachenko 2014; López-Navarro et al. 2015). Timeliness is also prompted by the growing number of works that point out to the dominance of Anglo-American perspectives in the social sciences and discuss the assumptions about the universality of social knowledge production (Connell 2006, 2007; De Sousa Santos 2008; Keim 2010). Our paper will contribute to this line of research by studying a field—that of the ‘sciences of crime’—that is only beginning to feel concerned by the admissibility of its claims to universality (as shown by Zimring 2006; Barberet 2007; Birkbeck 2011; Aas 2012; Carrington et al. 2015, 2018; Hogg et al. 2017; Moosavi 2018).

A last caveat is necessary before we present our data. This paper is not meant to demean the role of major journals or Anglo-American countries in the production and dissemination of legal and criminological knowledge. Instead, it seeks to make visible the bias in most of these journals towards the Anglo-American world. Although this is hardly a novel observation, it raises questions about the effects that the existing hierarchies of knowledge may have in the internationalisation of research. Few legal scholars and criminologists fully appreciate the extent to which such inequality persists in today’s world of increasing globalisation of knowledge. Highlighting it is the first step to call for a more productive and progressive engagement with the criminology and criminal justice from outside the Anglo-American core.

Data Sources and Methodology

Ten journals were selected based on two factors. The first one was their leading position in the SCImago Journal Rank on Law. All selected journals have high SJR indicators, a measure of a journal’s scientific influence that expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years. The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. We chose it over the Web of Science (WoS) because it contains more journals published in languages other than English and is generally considered to have a more European character (Bajerski 2011). Moreover, the journal coverage of WoS in Social Sciences is still quite low, while Scopus’s coverage is larger (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2015: 14). The ten journals are in the first quartile (Q1) of the impact factor distribution.

The second factor was their international orientation, either in accordance with their title or with the journal’s description or aims and scope published in their official websites. We understand both aspects as a statement of intent, to be preferred to journals which show no such international interest. We have included some journals that declare on their web pages that they have a national or regional component—for example, Criminology and Criminal Justice and Youth Justice, the UK, or the European Journal of Criminology, Europe—as long as the international one is also clearly stated. We did not discriminate by language. The ten selected journals were following:

  1. (1)

    Journal of Criminal Justice. An International Journal (JCJ). Position 19/564 in Law. SJR 1.586. Elsevier publishes it. According to its description, ‘The Journal of Criminal Justice is an international journal intended to fill the present need for the dissemination of new information, ideas and methods, to both practitioners and academicians in the criminal justice area’.

  2. (2)

    Punishment and Society. The International Journal of Penology (P&S). Position 29/564. SJR 1.393. Sage publishes it. According to its description and its aims and scope, ‘Punishment & Society is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that publishes the highest quality original research and scholarship dealing with punishment, penal institutions and penal control’.

  3. (3)

    The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society (BJC). Position 30/564. SJR 1.340. Oxford University Press publishes it. According to its description, ‘The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society is one of the world’s top criminology journals. It publishes work of the highest quality from around the world and across all areas of criminology’.

  4. (4)

    Theoretical Criminology. An international journal (TC). Position 36/564. SJR 1.280. Sage publishes it. According to its description, ‘Theoretical Criminology is a major interdisciplinary, international, peer-reviewed journal for the advancement of the theoretical aspects of criminological knowledge’.

  5. (5)

    Criminology and Criminal Justice. The International Journal of Policy and Practice (CCJ). Position 47/564. SJR 1.125. Sage publishes it. According to its description, ‘The journal seeks to reflect the vibrancy of the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice throughout the UK and internationally. It publishes work of the highest quality and academic rigour from around the world and across all areas of criminology and criminal justice’.

  6. (6)

    The European Journal of Criminology (EJC). Position 54/564. SJR 1.045. Published by Sage and the European Society of Criminology; the journal is clearly international in vocation, although only within the European range of interests. According to its description, ‘The European Journal of Criminology is an international, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality original research. It is the prime European source for authoritative information and analysis on crime and criminal justice issues’. According to its aims and scope, ‘Priority is given to articles that are relevant to the wider Europe (within and beyond the EU) although findings may be drawn from other parts of the world’.

  7. (7)

    The International Review of Victimology (IRV). Position 60/564. SJR 0.991. Sage publishes it. According to its description, ‘The International Review of Victimology is the leading international peer-reviewed journal for victimological research, focusing on traditional areas of research and broader concerns, such as political and human rights issues… Comparative or international perspectives are welcome’.

  8. (8)

    Deviant Behavior (DB). Position 73/564. SJR 0.822. Taylor & Francis publishes it. According to its description, ‘Deviant Behavior is the only journal that specifically and exclusively addresses social deviance. International and interdisciplinary in scope; it publishes refereed theoretical, descriptive, methodological, and applied papers’.

  9. (9)

    Youth Justice. An International Journal (YJ). Position 81/564. SJR 0.776. Sage publishes it. According to its aims and scope, ‘Youth Justice is an international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the analysis of juvenile/youth justice systems, law, policy and practice and comprises articles that are theoretically informed and/or grounded in the latest empirical research. Youth Justice… enjoys an ever-increasing international presence… The editors and editorial board aim to publish material that is both intellectually rigorous and accessible to a wide readership across the national and international academic, policy and practice communities’.

  10. (10)

    Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal (CMC). Position 88/564. SJR 0.722. Sage publishes it. According to its aims and scope, ‘Crime, Media, Culture is a fully peer reviewed, international journal providing the primary vehicle for exchange between scholars who are working at the intersections of criminological and cultural inquiry’.

We did not consider journals that restrict their main interest to very specific issues or perspectives, as is the case of Policing and Society, Homicide Studies and Behavioral Science and the Law, even though they had high scores at the SCImago Journal Rank. These topics are severely underrepresented in non-Anglophone academic traditions. The Journal of International Criminal Justice was also excluded. The journal addresses a topic that is international in its nature. Both circumstances could provoke unjustified deviations.

A snapshot of editorial board membership was taken from the lists provided on the journal home pages in April 2018. Content analysis was then carried out on the journals to investigate the institutional affiliation of authors and the country origin of data sources in the articles within selected issues (Fig. 1). As a current rather than historical account was sought, analysis was based on the last year of material, 2017.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Editorial board membership by country of affiliation (in percentage). Countries from the Anglosphere are represented in green

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The research questions of interest in this study concerning the set of ten journals include:

  1. (a)

    What are the international compositions of journal editorial boards?

  2. (b)

    What is the percentage of non-Anglo-American vs Anglo-American authored articles in these journals?

  3. (c)

    What are the patterns of international collaboration?

  4. (d)

    What is the country of origin of data used in the articles published in these journals?

Answering these questions provides some insights into the state of internationality of the journals.

Results of Editorial Board Membership Analysis

NationalityFootnote 7 of Editorial Board Members’ Institutional Affiliations

An analysis was conducted into the membership of the editorial boards for the top ten journals. This is interesting because editors act as gatekeepers, controlling who publishes in the journal—i.e. through editorial rejection of submitted manuscripts without peer review, or the selection of more or less sympathetic reviewers (Harzing and Metz 2013; Dyachenko 2014). Some studies show that the percentage of variation in the proportion of foreign-authored articles in a set of journals over a certain period can be explained by the percentage of foreign members on the editorial boards of the journals (Uzun 2004; Ravenides 2008; Liu 2009; Harzing and Metz 2013). Geographically diverse editorial boards are likely to facilitate the publication of papers with a wider range of research paradigms, methods and topics (Özbilgin 2004; Braun and Diospatonyi 2005; Stremersch and Verhoef 2005; Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft 2006; Feldman 2008; Harzing and Metz 2013; Kim et al. 2018). Furthermore, such information is more stable than the likelier annual fluctuations regarding the nationality of authors’ affiliations.

Among the positions counted as members were editors-in-chief, review and book review editors, founding editors, associate editors, deputy editors, executive editors and editors, as well as international advisory editors and members, editorial assistants and editorial board members. We compiled a database of 387 people with 465 editorial board memberships. 15.8% of the individuals, 61 people, were involved in more than one journal board. The size of the editorial boards varied from 20 people for IRV to 71 people for BJC, with an average of 46.5.

As shown in Table 1, 35.7% of the 465 board members are based in the US and 33.5% in the UK. The sum of these percentages is a high figure, 69.2% of the 465 board members, that leaves other countries far behind. The Anglophone dominance is even greater if we consider not only the US and the UK but also the countries of the Anglosphere or Inner Circle (see footnote 3). Both Australia (6.0%) and Canada (5.2%) achieve significant proportions, whereas New Zealand (1.5%) and Ireland (0.4%) have minimal representation. Even so, this brings the percentage of board members affiliated to institutions based in countries of the Anglosphere up to an average of 82.2%.

Table 1 Editorial board membership by country of affiliation and journal
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There are noticeable differences between journals. The journal with the highest percentage of board members located outside the US and the UK is EJC (72.7), followed by IRV (55%) and YJ (46.9%). At the other extreme, JCJ shows the highest percentage of US- and UK-based board members, 86.5%. P&S and DB both have over 70% of board members based in the US and the UK, while BJC, TC, CCJ and CMC all have more than 60%.

As already said, 15.8% of the individuals, 61 people, were involved in more than one journal board. Multiple membership to editorial boards varied, with 45 individuals on two boards, 14 on three boards and 2 influential academics on 4 boards of the top ten journals. Overlaps between editorial boards can contribute to the internationality of journals when multiboarders increase boards’ diversity, but this is not always the case. As shown in Fig. 2, US and UK affiliations stand out within the group of multiboarders, except in ECJ.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Shared editorial board members’ nationality

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Figure 3 shows the overlaps between memberships of editorial boards. The strongest overlap between editorial boards is that between P&S and TC, with 13 people serving on both boards—this equates to one-fourth of the total TC board membership. TC shares 80.8% of its editorial board membership with six of the ten journals—42 of 52 members—while in the other extreme, JCJ and IRV share only 5% with them—three of 59 for JCJ, all with DB, and one of 20 for IRV, in this case with BJC.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Shared editorial board members. The graph has a circle configuration, so the distances between nodes are arbitrary. Line’s width represents the strength of the ties among editorial boards. Numbers next to the lines indicate the number of shared board members between journals

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Institutional Links Between Editorial Board Members

Links between editorial board members were evident from an investigation of the institutional affiliations at which they were based. A closer look at the 387 academics on the editorial boards revealed that they came from 203 universities. One-fourth of these provided more than 50% of the total of board members.Footnote 8

Indeed, concentration of editorial board members within certain institutions is not surprising. Across all disciplines, there is evidence that academics from a small number of institutions tend to control top journal boards (McNamee and Willis 1994; Sutter and Kocher 2001). This is interesting not only because editing these journals leads to enhanced institutional and individual reputation but also because there is a direct connection between editorial board membership and the level of publishing activity in these top journals.

Even with our limited database, when the editorial board members’ activity was explored in combination with the content analysis of issues from the top ten journals, board members featured prominently as authors in the top ten journals over the last year, as well as in their own journals.

For the top ten journals overall, at least 22% of articles in these journals involved an author who served on one or more of the top ten editorial boards. Results were not consistent across the selected journals, nor did they depend on their position in the SCImago Journal Rank.

These results show less than half the percentage of editorial board members as authors in the top journals of criminology and criminal justice than in other fields. For example, in marketing it was found that, across the top ten journals overall, 48.6% of all articles published over one year included a top ten journal editorial board member among the authors (Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft 2006: 430).

On the other hand, we must assume that our selected board members published in 2017 in some other top journals that we have not considered. We know that they also published in their own journals, as shown in Table 2. On average, 82.6% of all articles signed by editors had an author member of the journal’s own editorial board.

Table 2 Articles with editorial board members as authors
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It should be ethically unproblematic that editorial board members publish in the same journal they edit, provided every effort is made to minimise any bias in the review process, although it would be more realistic to recognise that it is almost impossible to remove bias completely. Following our argument, this points out a more complex problem: Reinforcement of individual reputation of authoring editors through practices that may be detrimental for the journal’s quality because they make it less diverse.

Results of Institutional Affiliation of Authors’ Analysis

Nationality of Authors’ Institutional Affiliations

Under this heading, the degree of internationalisation of the journals was examined based on the nationality of the institutional affiliation (work centre) of the authors of the articles published in the selected journals over the year analysed (Fig. 4). For each journal, the total number of articles published has been counted according to the nationality of the work centres of the authors. We worked with data from 399 articles authored by 798 people.Footnote 9 The distribution of articles and authors among journals is quite wide, ranging from the 98 articles and 214 authors in DB to 13 articles and 29 authors in YJ. In any case, co-authorship is the general rule, with an average of 2.2 co-authors per article, with two extremes: 3.2 co-authors per article for JCJ and 1.4 for TC.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Nationality of authors’ institutional affiliation. Countries from the Anglosphere are represented in green

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If we look at the results of the total number of articles published in 2017, the countries with the greatest scientific output in the selected journals are, by far, the US and the UK. This predominance of Anglo-American elements is quite evident, with 42.0% and 22.1% of all published papers, respectively. This gives a joint result of over 64.1% for Anglo-American-authored or co-authored texts. Next is a country from the Anglosphere, Australia, contributing 9.0% of the papers. Fourth is the Netherlands, with 5.8%, followed by Canada, with 5.0%. Of the remaining countries, only Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and Germany exceed the 1% threshold, with 2.3, 1.3, 1.3, 1.3, 1.3 and 1.1%, respectively.

The percentage of authorships in each of the groups we are interested in (country which contributes most authors, US, UK, other countries from the Anglosphere, and rest of the world) varies considerably from one journal to another, as we can see in Table 3.

Table 3 International diversity of authorship
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In some cases, the percentage of authors from one single country is very high. This is incompatible with the journals’ supposedly international character. DB and JCJ are the journals that have the most authorships from one single country (US). The journals with the most British authorships are CCJ and CMC. On the contrary, EJC is the journal with the most authorship from outside the Anglosphere, with the Netherlands having the main nationality concentration (31.6%).

If we consider the international diversity of articles, the picture barely changes (see Table 4). In fact, DB has the highest proportion of US-authored articles and of articles that include at least one US-based author. JCJ has similar values. CCJ has the highest proportion of only UK-authored articles, followed by CMC. BJC, P&S and TC all also have high proportions of articles with at least one US- or UK-based author.

Table 4 International diversity of articles
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Other journals are more open, albeit less towards the rest of the world than to the broader Anglophone community from the Anglosphere. The proportion of authors from English-speaking countries other than the US and the UK is particularly high in YJ. This journal shows a different degree of internationalisation. We could say that it is more oriented towards its own linguistic community than to the international community strictly speaking, with 50% of authors from Australia and Canada.

With our data, only one journal seems to have a truly international coverage as its authors come from outside the Anglophone world: EJC. It publishes the greatest proportion of articles solely written by authors from the rest of the world, followed by IRV in a distant second place. At the other end of the scale, in TC, there were no articles solely written by authors from outside the Anglosphere, with 7.4% of articles being written by at least one author not based in a country from the Anglosphere. Low percentages are found in all remaining journals.

Overall, across all ten journals, the average percentage of articles with at least one Anglo-American author was 69.7%, which means that only 30.3% of all articles published in the top criminology and criminal justice international journals in 2017 were written without the involvement of an author based either in the US or in the UK. If we include the Anglosphere, the percentage of articles with at least one author from the Anglosphere rises to 94%. Again, EJC shows the lowest percentage, followed by IRV. In the other journals, articles authored by at least one author from the Anglosphere account for more than 90% of the total.

The nationality of authors’ institutional affiliation unequivocally confirms the Anglo-American hegemony in the structure of authorship in the most esteemed international journals of criminology and criminal justice. There is no previous study with which to compare, but we can venture to state that the analysis of papers by the authors’ national affiliation has undergone a significant change in the last decades. Just a brief view to the first numbers of our ten journals is quite telling.

International Collaborations

It is commonly accepted that SJR journals cover the international ‘mainstream literature’. Internationalisation implies that collaboration among scientists takes place along lines of common topics and irrespective of the country of origin of the collaborators. Such a notion of globalised scientific collaboration is not supported by our empirical data. Intra-country collaboration is about 10–50 times more likely to occur than international collaboration. National borders are still a solid barrier to collaboration. This should not be a surprise. There are greater opportunities to interact with one’s own country colleagues than with colleagues from other countries (Zitt and Bassecoulard 2004; Harzing and Metz 2013). However, differences between disciplines exist. Basic disciplines have more international collaborations than the socio-legal ones (Rey-Rocha and Martín-Sempere 2004), but national borders still have the strongest impact on patterns of scientific collaborations in all of them (Hennemann et al. 2012). Nevertheless, compared with other socio-legal disciplines, there is far less international collaboration in the fields of criminology and criminal justice (Kim et al. 2014, 2018).

Surprisingly, once we consider only international collaborations, it is more likely that co-authorships will take place between countries from the Anglosphere and other countries than solely within the Anglosphere, but, again, results by journal are quite diverse (see Table 5).

Table 5 International co-authorship linkages
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The remainder of this section uses a new visualisation tool to map the geography of international co-authorship linkages: the network of international co-authorships between countries around the world. The global map illustrates that many co-authorship links occur across the Atlantic, between Europe and the US, and also that the UK is the primary node connecting Europe to the world in terms of international collaborations, with the Netherlands acting as a secondary one (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
figure 5

Global map with the network of co-authorship linkages. To simplify visualisation, lines are held constant regardless of the number of links. Green lines represent the links between co-authors from the Anglosphere. Black lines represent the links between insiders and outsiders. Purple lines represent co-authorship between authors affiliated to countries outside the Anglosphere. Dots are shown in grey when they connect different categories. Otherwise, they maintain the colour of the lines that connect them. The size of dots indicates the number of co-authored articles by country of affiliation. Map created at GPSVisualizer.com with map data from OpenStreetMap.org

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Results of Content Journal Analysis

The next stage of the content analysis was a review of location of data sources used in the empirical articles within the ten selected journals. Articles that did not include real world data were first eliminated from the analysis. These results are interesting because they connect with what Connell (2006: 258) calls ‘the claim of universality’: Anglo-American social theory makes claims to universal relevance without explicitly acknowledging its metropolitan origin.

Given the high levels of involvement from US- and UK-based authors revealed in the first stage of the analysis; a look at the location of data sources used in research may have been considered redundant. However, recalling the journals’ positioning statements described earlier, it was relevant to establish whether the material in the journals had more of a global flavour than would be revealed through authorship alone. Approximately 15% of these articles were general in character—that is, not connected to any specific geographical area. Among the selected articles with locatable empirical evidence, we counted 361 qualitative and quantitative sources. The distribution by countries is shown in Table 6 and Fig. 6. Now we have two more locations to consider: international and the internet. However, again, the preponderance of Anglo-American data, and more generally from the Anglosphere, is striking.

Table 6 Countries of data by journal
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Fig. 6
figure 6

Countries of data. Countries from the Anglosphere are represented in green; new categories (international and the Internet) in yellow

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EJC shows the highest percentage of data originated outside the Anglosphere. This result is a consequence of the journal’s editorial policy, understood as ‘a clear mandate to publish scholarship of direct relevance to the European Union and its various member-states’ (Roberts 2011: 5).

Some distinctive observations emerge from the results presented in Table 6 and Fig. 6. First, with noticeable differences by journal, the topical interests of most top journals remain Anglo-American-centric in that the US and the UK are featured most prominently in terms of country of origin of the data. In other words, there are more empirical publications on the US and the UK than on all other countries and regions of the world combined. A more disturbing finding is that, barring all language barriers and other difficulties, a significant proportion of publications that use country data from outside the Anglosphere originate from scholars based outside them, in particular in the US and the UK.

Second, allowing the subject matter of the pieces to revolve primarily around the Anglo-American data carries the risk of constraining the topical range of future investigations and regional topics, as well as the parallel risk of marginalising approaches to criminology and criminal justice from different cultural and socio-legal perspectives.

Third and foremost, it also introduces concerns about the uncritical transfer of results from the Anglo-American research to non-Anglo-American contexts. Claims to universality have been contested by a rising number of contributions that propose to reconsider criminal law and criminology’s Anglo- or Western-centrism (from Cohen 1988 [1982], and Beirne 1983, to Agozino 2004, Belknap 2016, and Carrington et al. 2015, 2018), in order to decentre knowledge production and to attain a broader and more accurate approach to understanding crime, justice and punishment in non-Anglo-American contexts.

Discussion

The indicators used show that the top international journals of criminology and criminal justice have still not attained a high degree of internationalisation. They are still tied down considerably by their national origins. Even as editors boast that both the journal and the editorial board have ‘an emphatically international character’, the Anglo-American dominance in all the fields analysed here is undeniable. If we add all board members and authors from the Anglosphere, they account for 82.2 and 78.1%, respectively. Countries with a long legal tradition and a considerable number of scholars and academic institutions, such as China, France, Germany, Italy or Spain, contribute less than 1.7% each—values that are rather symbolic, far below the real weight of their current scientific output.

Our data fit well with many studies on international scientific production. The rankings by country of affiliation systematically show the hegemonic place of the US and, in Europe, of the UK, especially when considering high-quality production or the most cited scientific publications. For instance, according to the European Commission (2018: 154 ff.), based on Scopus database, the world share of scientific publications is of 19.5% for the US, 16.7% for China, 4.6% for the UK, 4.5% for Germany, 3% for Italy, 2.9% for France and 2.5% for Spain. If we consider only the world share of highly cited scientific publications, numbers are a bit different (European Commission 2018: 157). The world leader in the production of high-quality scientific papers is the US, with 31.5%, followed by China with 12%, the UK with 7.0%, Germany with 5.4%, France with 3.5%, Italy with 3.1%, and Spain with 2.6%. In Law, more specifically, according to the SCImago Country Rank, the US and the UK occupy the first positions for scientific papers published and included in the Scopus database, followed by Australia, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, China, Spain, France and Italy. These data show that non-Anglophone countries, including global players like China, are underrepresented in the top ten journals of criminal law and criminology. The underrepresentation is even greater if we take into account that Scopus only offers a biased coverage of literature in other languages than English, as a growing number of studies show (Andersen 2000; Van Leeuwen et al. 2001; Archambault et al. 2006; Lillis and Curry 2010; Montgomery 2013; Albarillo 2014). Therefore, it seriously underestimates the research contribution of scholars in non-Anglophone countries (Burgess et al. 2014; Dyachenko 2014).Footnote 10 The percentage of non-Anglophone journals in this source is very low, and the distribution of journals by country uneven, favouring Anglophone countries. The distribution of papers among publication languages reflects a much greater number of publications in English overall compared with other languages (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2015).

Taken all together, indexed legal and criminological journals constitute a small, very Anglo-American-centric fragment of the legal and criminological publishing space. The majority of these journals—all but EJC—could only be considered ‘international’ if one follows the definition of the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH+), according to which ‘Authorship [of a journal] is international when less than two thirds of the articles published in the journal are written by scholars affiliated with institutions in the same country’ (emphasis added). On the contrary, if one considers the linguistic community and strong academic network between the US and the UK as a factor that diminishes the quality of this form of internationalisation, the results are quite different.

This may be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, in socio-legal sciences, there is still a strong tendency in many countries for authors to publish in their own language and in their own national journals. This is particularly true for criminal justice. Criminal justice scholarship is still fragmented into national or linguistic communities. Most legal research is undertaken within national boundaries. The obvious reason lies in the nature of subject matter. In law, political, cultural, linguistic and historical features play an important role. The relevance of other languages in this specific cultural, national and local-encumbered scientific domain is clearly understandable. In sum, criminal justice scholars do not constitute a proper international scientific community because their interests are too often connected to local, regional and national topics that are not appropriate for internationalisation.

Conversely, criminology is usually considered a discipline under a strong Western, more specifically Anglo-American dominance in terms of its theoretical production (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Agozino 2003, 2004; Morrison 2006; Kitossa 2012; Moosavi 2018). Some degree of US dominance is to be expected given the sheer size of social and legal sciences in this country. The US accounts for 33% of the world’s research funding (55 countries surveyed), employs 24% of the world’s researchers in terms of fulltime equivalent (53 countries surveyed) and produces around 26% of the world’s PhDs in social sciences (48 countries surveyed) and 30–40% of all social science research articles (UNESCO 2010: 368-385). One could safely assume that Americans dominate the top journals because they have a huge and diverse education system, an expansive middle class, considerable educational resources, huge amounts of governmental and private sector funding for research and a very long history of teaching criminology and researching crime and justice. The British case is different. The UK shows a clearly higher-than-average presence in this field, which can be explained by its traditional academic link with the US. However, we cannot ignore the considerable scientific production in China, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands or Scandinavia, only to mention some examples. Particularly, China is severely underrepresented in criminology and criminal justice journals, given that it is the second largest producer of articles in the sciences overall. Moreover, the American dominance in criminology is not so clear from an historical perspective. A look to the authors’ list in Rafter’s The origins of criminology. A reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) is quite telling. Besides, in criminology, cultural, national and local perspectives are not the exception, but rather the rule. Since these locally generated perspectives cannot be universalized due to their immediate and obvious specificity, it is understandable that they are mainly published not in the so-called international journals but in the national ones (Suzuki et al. 2017; Mazenod 2018).

On the other hand, it could be safe to assume that the Anglo-Americans are simply the best. In fact, there is an increasingly common belief among native English-speaking researchers—particularly Anglo-American ones—that everything of importance is published in English in the so-called international journals, thus rendering works appearing in publications not featured on Web of Science or Scopus with little value (Aalbers 2004; Paasi 2005; Montgomery 2013). According to this perspective, non-Anglo-American researchers do not publish in these journals because they are not good enough; the same reason why they are not invited to become members of editorial boards.

We have already showed that there is a disproportionate representation of certain countries in the databases. Some nations that are highly active in scientific research remain relatively underrepresented. It is still difficult for non-English-speaking scholars to publish in English in the top international journals controlled by a majority of Anglo-American editorial board members. On the one hand, they are discouraged from publishing because of both the language disadvantage (Ammon 2001, 2008, 2010; Aalbers 2004; Flowerdew 2008; Uzuner 2008; Burgess et al. 2014; Dyachenko 2014; López-Navarro et al. 2015) and the different forms and structures of conducting research (Uzuner 2008; Gea-Valor et al. 2014; López-Navarro et al. 2015). After all, as Hyland (2009: 88) put it, research articles are ‘sites of disciplinary engagement’. The internationalisation of knowledge is caught up in a web of power relations that are constituted by language and academic traditions (Sutter and Kocher 2001). Anglo-American referees and editors actively act as gatekeepers, disciplining and policing modes of communication, ideas, theories and interpretations, making them conform to standards set by themselves, even if they come from completely different academic traditions and cultures. This practice introduces significant inequalities in the production of legal and criminological knowledge at the international level, with dominance by Anglo-American researchers and theories.

On the other hand, editors, book review editors and editorial board members are well aware that their journals have to engage with their own national communities. Therefore, a contrast with the Anglo-American experience or the use of Anglo-American literature is often a ‘must’. Putting one’s research into a wider theoretical context in a dialogue with the relevant literature belongs to the rules of research reporting of the canon. Interestingly, the literature usually refers to the Anglo-American literature, since there is no place for other national traditions (Aalbers 2004). The UK- and US-based referee’s comments often force a non-native English-speaking author to rewrite her or his paper and add a full review of Anglo-American literature that is not always the most relevant one or the one the author is interested in dialoguing with. The boundaries of what passes for ‘international’ debate in the socio-legal sciences are determined from within the Anglo-American academy, which is endowed with an extraordinary sanctioning power towards any external infiltrations: non-publication. In fact, non-Anglo-American authors operating outside this context are excluded from publication, their research defined as marginal or irrelevant.

Conclusions

Data obtained confirm what was suspected, but had not hitherto been measured. From the evidence collected here, it is undeniable that an Anglo-American hegemony in the areas of criminology and criminal justice represented by our top ten international journals exists. Most of them do not have a high international profile, both if one takes the institutional affiliation of editorial board members and of authors and the origin of data used. These journals publish in English, with Anglo-American editors, articles written by Anglo-American authors with Anglo-American content and data. Their publication space is constituted by a centre-margin imaginary, one that positions the US and the UK as ‘the centre’ and others, depending on their degree of incorporation, as ‘the margins’. The so-called international journals of criminology and criminal justice function mainly as vehicles of communication between the Anglo-American community and from this community towards the rest of the world. Most of them should be considered ‘regional’, rather than international, in the sense that they publish research with primarily domestic significance mainly directed to their own linguistic community. As Smith (2006: 5) put it, ‘in practice most of these journals are dominated by articles from local authors about local or regional issues’.

The only exception is EJC. This can be partly explained by its aims and scope. In the editorial written by David J. Smith for the first journal issue, he stated that ‘the launch of a European Journal of Criminology could be seen as a counterbalance to American hegemony in systematic social science research on crime and criminal justice… Europe needs to develop its own humanistic criminological tradition as a counterbalance to the dominant model, which serves the punitive American system’ (Smith 2004: 8-9). The journal, however, is not established in opposition to the American model of criminology, but as a way to encourage the flow of information and debate in both directions across the Atlantic. ‘This is all the more important because American criminology journals provide little coverage of research from outside the United States, and most American criminologists do not read the languages in which much European criminology is published’ (Smith 2004: 10). Because of the journal’s policy, EJC include contributions from the widest range of European countries, both within and beyond the EU, and from outside Europe.

But most importantly, it is not casual that EJC is also the journal with the highest percentage of editorial board members located outside the US and the UK.Footnote 11 The editor’s role in selecting the papers’ content and authors is not to be ignored. An editor with an Anglo-American background is more prone to perceive pieces of British and American authors with a more favourable eye, further strengthened by the richness of the language that typically characterises these papers. It is much harder for such an editor to accept the writings of authors with a different academic tradition, coming from a different culture, writing about distant (and often peripheral, from the Anglo-centric point of view) regions often using less refined language. Editorial teams are also responsible for matching reviewers with individual papers. They also play a pivotal role in defining the subject matter that creates the profile of the publication. In sum, they can play an active role in encouraging the submission of work from beyond the Anglo-American world. We can hypothesise that the inclusion of non-English-speaking and periphery scholars on editorial boards of mainstream journals may promote their international character, as it happened in other fields (see Harzing and Metz 2013), and the same can be said about their involvement as referees.

However, it should be noted that our study provides merely a snapshot, and a more complete picture may emerge if one considers a larger set of journals over longer periods. Even now, it is perceptible that something is changing. Since the late 1990s, there is evidence of growing internationalisation. The mere fact that some of these journals (BJC and YJ) changed their subtitle to include the word ‘international’ is a clear sign of a new commitment, as it is the growing internationalisation of editorial boards and contents. In fact, the noticeable differences among journals should remind us that the glass is half full as well as half empty, proving that there is much room for progress towards the internationalisation of knowledge.

The progress of internationalisation may therefore present an opportunity to redress the existing imbalances and to develop scholarly approaches which are more equally distributed in geo-political terms. This is not only due to a sense of global justice but also because the self-sufficiency of an Anglo-centric framework is today, as an epistemological position, less acceptable than before, due to the complex enmeshment of national and local societies with each other. However, whether a more international orientation will in fact be sufficient to reverse the ‘one-way flow of ideas’ (Connell in Kenway and Fahey 2009: 13), will depend on the ability of all actors involved—editorial board members, authors, referees, publishers—to develop strategies that avoid reinforcing existing asymmetries of knowledge. Probably a fundamental reworking of the way peer-reviewed journals work may be necessary. In any case, only with a clear view of the problems will it be possible to contribute towards developing a truly interactive international academy.