Departmental Standing
In 1995 the
National Research Council published its latest review and ranking of
Doctoral-granting graduate programs in 41 disciplines. (Go to: http://stills.nap.edu/html/researchdoc).
Unfortunately, criminal justice was not one of the disciplines ranked. The NRC
is planning on including criminal justice in its next cycle of reviews, and
discussions have been underway between the NRC and the Consortium of Doctoral
Programs in Criminal Justice and Criminology, led by Todd Clear of John Jay
College-CUNY. So at the current time there are no universally agreed upon
rankings of criminal justice programs.
Periodically, however, criminal justice scholars rank
criminal justice programs based on the productivity of their affiliated faculty.
The most recent examination ranks Temple's criminal justice program third in
the country.[1]
Sorensen and Pilgrim (2001) looked at faculty
publishing in the eight top criminology and criminal justice journals for the
period 1995 through 1999.[2] They then generated a weighted number of
articles per program based on number of authors and institutional affiliations
of authors. Twenty-four institutions had seven or more articles appearing in
these leading journals.
Temple's ranking places it above some of the programs
considered leaders in the field including Albany, Rutgers, Michigan State,
Florida State, Carnegie Mellon and Penn State.
A roughly comparable examination for the period
1983-1992 ranked Temple eighth. The table below, adapted from Table 3 in
Sorensen and Pilgrim (2001), shows the top ten ranked institutions for both
examinations.
| Productivity Ranking |
Period |
|
| 1983-1992 | 1995-1999 | |
| 1 | University of Maryland | University of Cincinnati |
| 2 | SUNY-Albany | University of Maryland |
| 3 | Rutgers | Temple University |
| 4 | University of Florida | SUNY-Albany |
| 5 | Indiana University | Sam Houston State |
| 6 | Penn State | University of Central Florida |
| 7 | Michigan State | University of Missouri-St. Louis |
| 8 | Temple University | Washington State |
| 9 | University of Colorado | University of Nebraska-Omaha |
| 10 | University of Cincinnati | Penn State |
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[1] Sorensen, J., and Pilgrim, R. (2001). The Institutional affiliations
of authors in leading criminology and criminal justice journals. Journal of
Criminal Justice 30, 11-18.
[2] The eight journals are: Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice
and Behavior, Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal
of Criminal Law and Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology,
Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.