Cuadernos de Politica Criminal

About Cuadernos de Politica Criminal

Cuadernos de Política Criminal — Journal Profile

Cuadernos de Política Criminal — in English, Criminal Policy Notebooks — is a Spanish journal of criminal law and criminal policy, published in Madrid by Dykinson since 2003 and currently in its second series (Segunda Época). It is a doctrinal law journal in the classic Spanish style: long studies in criminal law (Estudios penales), a running jurisprudential section that digests and comments on the criminal case law of Spain's Constitutional Court and Supreme Court period by period, a bibliographic section reviewing new criminal-law scholarship, and a news section. Its print ISSN is 0210-4059 and its electronic ISSN is 2340-9290. The journal had, by 2011, already been publishing for more than thirty years, and its issue numbering — No. 145 appeared in mid-2025 and No. 147 at the end of 2025 — places it among the long-lived fixtures of Spanish penal scholarship.

This profile is written with an explicit honesty note, because the journal is a traditional subscription law title and its publisher's public pages are a bookshop rather than an author platform. The facts below about the journal's identity, publisher, sections, contents, access prices and digital identifiers are drawn from the publisher's own records and are stated with their sources. The journal's manuscript submission route, its review timetable and any author charges could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and they are recorded below as not publicly disclosed in those sources rather than guessed at — authors should obtain them directly from the publisher.

At a Glance

• Full title: Cuadernos de Política Criminal
• Series: Segunda Época (second series)
• Print ISSN: 0210-4059 (the ISSN carried in the publisher's article records)
• Electronic ISSN: 2340-9290 (the identifier carried in this site's original record; OpenAlex records the pair 0210-4059 and 2340-9290)
• Publisher: Dykinson, Madrid, Spain — publisher of the journal from 2003
• Country: Spain
• Language: Spanish (article titles are also given in English in the publisher's records)
• Fields: Criminal law, criminal policy, criminal procedure and sentencing, and the criminal jurisprudence of the Spanish Constitutional Court and Supreme Court
• Frequency: Three issues a year in recent practice, organised by four-month periods, as its issue sequence and case-law sections show
• Sections: Estudios penales; Sección jurisprudencial; Sección bibliográfica; Noticiario
• Access model: Paid. The publisher sells print issues, electronic issues and individual articles in PDF (see the access section below for the prices recorded for a recent issue)
• Article DOIs: Assigned under the 10.14679 prefix in the publisher's recent records, with dates of receipt and acceptance printed for each article
• Author charges and submission route: Could not be verified from the sources fetched — recorded as not publicly disclosed there
• Catalogue presence: Recorded in Dialnet, the Spanish scholarly portal, whose journal record the OpenAlex entry points to

History and Publisher

The description of the journal carried by the legal database vLex, in an entry dated 2011, calls it a journal with more than thirty years of experience and publication whose fundamental objective remains the dissemination of the principal research of the most relevant researchers and practitioners of criminal law. A precise founding year could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and none is asserted here; what the record supports is a title already more than three decades old by 2011, now publishing in a second series, with its numbering carried continuously into the 140s by 2025.

The modern publishing history is clear on its key date: from 2003, Cuadernos de Política Criminal has been published by Dykinson, the Madrid legal publisher, and the numbers before that date remain accessible through archive collections of the journal, as the Andalusian Parliament's library record of the second series notes in reproducing the publisher's statement. Dykinson, based in Madrid, is one of Spain's established legal publishers, and the journal sits in its catalogue as a flagship criminal-law periodical. The publisher's shop records for recent issues give the journal's continuing shape: issue No. 136 appeared in May 2022; No. 145 in 2025, dated June of that year in its article records; and an article in No. 147 is dated 31 December 2025. Counted across those three years, the sequence advances by roughly three issues a year, and the journal's own jurisprudential summaries describe their coverage in four-month periods — the extract in one issue covering the Constitutional Court's rulings for the third four-month period of 2021, for example — which corroborates a three-issues-a-year rhythm organised by cuatrimestres.

The original JournalsWorld record for this post gave the journal's coverage as a short recent run (2020–2025) and its publisher as a numeric placeholder. Both understate and misstate the reality in the same way as with other older Spanish titles in this directory: the coverage window was the holding window of one bibliographic feed, not the journal's history, and the publisher is Dykinson, named in that publisher's own records for the journal's articles. Both points are listed as corrections items for the underlying record.

Scope and the Shape of an Issue

The journal's field is criminal law understood broadly, including the policy choices — política criminal — that shape what is criminalised, how offences are defined and how penalties are set and executed. A recent issue shows the territory concretely. Issue No. 145 (2025) includes a study of sexual offences and consent, examining the unilateral alteration of the conditions of consent (the practice known as stealthing) against the elements of offences against sexual freedom; a study of the so-called romance scam, analysing the fraud offence and the sufficiency of deception in online dating fraud, which the journal's summary identifies as one of the most relevant current cybercrimes; a study of the criminal policy of the "other", moving from inclusion under the rule of law to exclusion in a contemporary context; and a study of the offence of usurpation of real estate and its connected offences — breaking and entering, fraud, coercion and the arbitrary exercise of one's own right. An article recorded for No. 147 (2025) takes up the criminal-law implications of quantum computing for cryptography and cybersecurity — evidence that the journal's doctrinal remit follows criminal law into new technology as readily as into its classical subjects.

Alongside the studies, two standing sections give the journal its reference value for practitioners. The Sección jurisprudencial offers, period by period, a panorama of the criminal jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, with extracts of the Constitutional Court's judgments for the period and a guided summary of Supreme Court rulings across the whole run of current criminal questions — in one recent period, professional-office breaking offences, computer damage, road-safety offences and driving without a licence, civil liability in motor circulation, expert evidence and forgery of commercial documents, among others. The Sección bibliográfica reviews new criminal-law books at length — recent examples include a general-part textbook on the system of criminal law, a monograph on the execution and prescription of fines, and a work on tax regularisation and offences against the public treasury — and a Noticiario section carries professional and scholarly news. A subscription therefore serves two uses at once: research studies for scholars, and a digested, commented record of the courts' criminal output for practitioners who must keep current.

Editorial Practice — What the Record Shows

What can be verified about the journal's editorial practice comes from the publisher's article records themselves, and it is worth more than a generic claim would be. Those records print, for each article, its dates of receipt and of acceptance alongside its DOI, pages, keywords and bilingual title. In No. 147, for example, the article on quantum computing and cybersecurity is recorded as received on 5 November 2025 and accepted on 4 December 2025; in No. 145, the study of real-estate usurpation is recorded as received on 17 December 2024 and accepted on 14 April 2025, and the criminal-policy study as received on 6 May 2025 and accepted on 19 May 2025. Receipt-to-acceptance intervals of that kind — weeks to a few months in these recent instances — indicate an active editorial process with dated decisions, and the practice of printing the dates is a transparency feature authors can inspect for themselves in the publisher's catalogue before submitting anything.

Beyond that, this profile makes no claims it cannot support. The journal's formal peer-review protocol, its manuscript submission route and address, and whether any author charge applies could not be verified from the sources fetched, and are recorded here as not publicly disclosed in those sources. A prospective author should write to Dykinson — the publisher's contact details are given in its own catalogue records — and obtain the current author instructions directly. That is a normal route for a traditional Spanish doctrinal law journal of this generation, whose author relationships have historically run through its editorial community rather than through a public submission portal, but authors accustomed to online submission systems should not assume one exists for this title.

Access and Prices

Cuadernos de Política Criminal is a paid-access journal, and its access model should not be confused with the open-access titles elsewhere in this batch of profiles. The publisher's record for issue No. 145 offers the print issue at €60.00, the electronic edition at €50.00, and individual articles in PDF at €9.00 each. Libraries and practitioners reach its contents through purchase and through the legal databases and library collections that carry it, and its record in Dialnet gives bibliographic access to its tables of contents. No open-access statement, licence or article processing charge for this journal could be verified from the sources fetched, and none is claimed. Authors for whom immediate open access is a funder requirement should establish the position with the publisher before submitting, because the journal's standard model, as sold, is the paid one described here.

Metrics — What Can Be Verified

OpenAlex, resolving the journal through the ISSN endpoint for 2340-9290 and checked for this profile, recorded Cuadernos de Política Criminal with 952 works and 300 citations, an h-index of 5 and an i10-index of 0, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.13 at the time of checking. Its recent counts there were twenty works in 2025 and nine in the 2026 count. Its leading topic labels were criminal law and policy, criminal justice and penology, legal processes and jurisprudence, and criminal law and evidence — a fair machine summary of the journal's actual contents as described above. This site's original record, drawn from a different database, gave an h-index of 3, and described the journal in the fourth quartile. As with the other Spanish titles in this batch, the structural facts — a run of more than four decades implied by its history, continuous numbering into the 140s, a specialist legal publisher, standing jurisprudential and bibliographic sections — are the more reliable guide to the journal's standing among Spanish criminal lawyers, a community whose citations live disproportionately in books, commentaries and court decisions rather than in the article databases from which the figures above are drawn.

Who This Journal Is For

The journal is written for the Spanish criminal-law community: university scholars of criminal law and criminal policy, doctoral researchers in penal subjects, judges, prosecutors and practising lawyers who need both doctrine and a digested record of the higher courts' criminal jurisprudence, and law libraries serving all of them. Its studies section is the natural destination for finished doctrinal research on Spanish criminal law — on offences and their elements, on consent and sexual freedom, on fraud and cybercrime, on sentencing and penalties, on criminal policy toward migration, corruption and organised crime, and on the criminal-law treatment of new technologies — while its jurisprudential section is reason enough for a practitioner to keep the subscription even in a year when no study matches their specialism. Its bibliographic section performs the same service for new books.

Two cautions complete the picture for authors. First, the journal is a Spanish-language, Spanish-law doctrinal title: comparative work is at home in it when it speaks directly to Spanish criminal law or policy, but work whose legal frame is wholly another jurisdiction belongs in that jurisdiction's journals. Second, as the section above records, its submission route and review arrangements are not published in the sources this profile could fetch, so the first step for any author is a direct enquiry to the publisher — a small friction that is normal for its generation of law journals and should be budgeted into the timetable.

Similar Journals and a Disambiguation Note

One disambiguation is essential. Política Criminal, published by the Centro de Estudios de Derecho Penal of the Universidad de Talca in Chile, is a completely different journal — a Chilean criminal-policy title — which shares two of this journal's three title words and appears readily in web searches on the phrase. Cite and search by the full title Cuadernos de Política Criminal, by ISSN 0210-4059 or 2340-9290, or by the publisher Dykinson, and the two titles separate cleanly.

Within Spain, authors in this field commonly weigh this journal against the Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminología, associated with the UNED, and the open-access Revista Electrónica de Ciencia Penal y Criminología, whose fully online model is the opposite pole from this journal's traditional paid one; the comparison between those models — reach and openness against the doctrinal community and jurisprudential apparatus of a long-established print title — is the real editorial judgement an author in Spanish criminal law has to make. Within this site's directory, the neighbouring history profiles in this batch show the same Spanish journal landscape from the humanities side.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Cuadernos de Política Criminal? Print ISSN 0210-4059, carried in the publisher's article records, and electronic ISSN 2340-9290, carried in this site's original record; OpenAlex records the two as the journal's ISSN pair.

Who publishes it, and since when? Dykinson, of Madrid, has published the journal from 2003, in its second series. The journal itself is older: a 2011 legal-database description already credited it with more than thirty years of publication. A precise founding year could not be verified from the sources fetched and is not asserted here.

What does it publish? Doctrinal studies in criminal law and criminal policy (Estudios penales), a period-by-period jurisprudential panorama of the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court's Criminal Chamber, reviews of new criminal-law books, and professional news.

How often does it appear? Its recent numbering — No. 136 in May 2022, No. 145 in mid-2025, No. 147 at the end of 2025 — advances by about three issues a year, and its case-law sections are organised by four-month periods.

Is it open access? No open-access model could be verified. The publisher sells the journal: for issue No. 145 the recorded prices were €60.00 in print, €50.00 in electronic form and €9.00 for an individual article PDF.

How do I submit, and is there a charge? The submission route, review protocol and any author charge could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile and are recorded as not publicly disclosed there; contact the publisher, Dykinson, for current author instructions.

What are its citation metrics? OpenAlex at checking recorded 952 works, 300 citations, an h-index of 5 and an i10-index of 0. This site's original record, from a different source, showed an h-index of 3.

Is it the same journal as Política Criminal? No. Política Criminal is a separate Chilean journal, published at the Universidad de Talca. This journal is the Spanish Dykinson title with the ISSNs given above.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the publisher Dykinson's own catalogue records for the journal (issue No. 145's contents, prices and article records, and the No. 147 article record with its ISSN 0210-4059, DOI, and receipt and acceptance dates), on the Andalusian Parliament library's record of the journal's second series, which reproduces the publisher's statement that Dykinson has published the journal from 2003 and describes its sections and contents for issues No. 135 and 136, on the vLex source description dated 2011 (more than thirty years of publication; objective of disseminating leading criminal-law research), on Dialnet's journal record as pointed to by OpenAlex, on the record resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint (source S4306507330; ISSN pair, host publisher Dykinson, works, citations and topics as at checking), and on this site's original record for the post (electronic ISSN and quartile categorisation). Items that could not be verified from those sources — founding year, submission route, review protocol, author charges and any open-access terms — are stated as unverified in the text rather than filled in by inference. Twin checking for this post is saved with this profile's working files: an ISSN-search co-result proved on direct fetch to be a different journal entirely (Discover Geoscience, post 625776), whose search-result identity was a search-index artefact, and no twin of this journal was found.