The British Journal of Criminology

About The British Journal of Criminology

The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society

The British Journal of Criminology (BJC) is one of the longest-established and most influential peer-reviewed journals in criminology. Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, it carries the full title The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society. Despite the word “British” in its name, the journal is explicitly international in authorship, readership and subject matter: OUP describes it as a world-leading criminology journal that publishes work of the highest quality from around the world and across all areas of criminology. For researchers deciding where to submit, for librarians building a collection, and for readers tracing how modern criminology developed, BJC remains a reference point against which newer titles are measured.

This profile sets out what the journal is, where it came from, what it publishes, how its peer review and publishing model work, how its metrics should and should not be read, and what an author should check before submitting. Every factual claim below is drawn from the journal’s publisher, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, or a named secondary source, and the source list accompanying this profile records where each element was verified.

At a Glance

History and Identity

The journal’s history explains much of its standing. According to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ own history, its predecessor body, the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, published the first issue of the British Journal of Delinquency in 1950. In 1960 the journal’s name was changed to The British Journal of Criminology, reflecting the way the discipline itself had outgrown the narrower language of “delinquency” and become a broad social-science field concerned with crime, law, punishment and social order. OUP marked the journal’s 60th anniversary under its current title in 2020 with a curated collection drawing one influential article from each decade since the first issue of July 1960, spanning topics from radical criminology and restorative justice to the adverse effects of counterterrorism regulation.

That lineage matters for two practical reasons. First, the back archive is unusually deep: seven decades of scholarship document the formation of British and international criminology, including debates that still structure the field. Second, the journal is owned in a scholarly rather than purely commercial sense: it is the journal of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, an independent educational charity that works to advance public understanding of crime and criminal justice, and it is produced with a major university press. OUP presents BJC as the Centre’s journal and describes the relationship directly on the journal homepage. Authors who care about society-linked publishing, and readers who care about editorial independence, will find that governance arrangement relevant.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

OUP’s author-facing description is deliberately broad. The journal welcomes submissions from a variety of perspectives focusing on crime and society, and especially articles written from sociological, historical, philosophical, geographical, psychological, jurisprudential, cultural, political, or policy standpoints. The publisher stresses that the interests of the Editorial Board and the International Advisory Board are catholic — neither narrowly ideological nor limited to rigid conceptions of what criminology should be about. In practice, that breadth shows up across several recurring territories:

• Crime, deviance and social control — how harmful and rule-breaking behaviour is defined, measured, patterned and responded to, including work on crime trends, victimisation and offending trajectories.
• Policing and criminal justice institutions — police culture and practice, courts, prosecution, probation and the everyday working of justice systems, in Britain and comparatively.
• Punishment and penology — prisons, community sanctions, rehabilitation and the politics of punishment, a historic strength of the journal reflected in its named prize for criminal justice scholarship.
• Marginality, inequality and justice — research on how gender, race, class, age, migration status and disability shape exposure to crime and to state power.
• State crime, corporate harm and regulation — harms produced or tolerated by powerful actors, and the regulatory systems meant to contain them.
• Technology, surveillance and new forms of crime — digital offending, data-driven policing, forensic technologies and the governance questions they raise.
• Historical and theoretical criminology — work that re-reads the discipline’s past or develops its conceptual tools, including philosophical and jurisprudential analysis.

Alongside original research articles, BJC publishes a substantial book review section, which OUP and the Centre both highlight as part of the journal’s service to the field, and it occasionally produces special issues and post-publication virtual issues that gather related articles thematically. The two assessment criteria OUP states for submissions are worth quoting in substance because they tell authors exactly how editors think: a manuscript is judged on the degree to which it contributes new knowledge to an understanding of crime and society, and on the overall quality of its argument and presentation. A technically competent study that adds little new knowledge, or a novel study argued carelessly, is unlikely to survive that test.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

Oxford Academic lists Eamonn Carrabine as the journal’s Editor, supported by an editorial team and an extensive Editorial Board and International Advisory Board whose breadth underpins the journal’s catholic scope. Editorial rosters change over time, so the masthead on the journal homepage should always be treated as the current authority rather than any secondary listing, including this one.

OUP describes the review process as a detailed, double-blind process: reviewers and authors are anonymised to each other, and the feedback is intended to give authors an understanding of the manuscript’s perceived strengths and weaknesses, the basis for the editorial decision, and advice on how to proceed. For authors, three implications follow. Manuscripts must be properly anonymised before submission, including self-citations written in a way that does not identify the author. The process is deliberately rigorous, and OUP presents that rigour as a quality filter rather than a formality, so realistic timelines and a willingness to undertake substantial revision should be assumed. And because decisions rest on contribution and quality of argument, framing — explaining plainly why the paper changes what readers know about crime and society — is part of the scholarly work, not packaging added afterwards.

Publishing Model, Access and Charges

BJC is a hybrid journal. The default route is subscription publication: articles appear in issues sold to libraries and individual subscribers, and readers without a subscription will encounter paywalled content. OUP states that BJC is a hybrid open-access journal and that authors may choose to pay an open-access fee to make an accepted manuscript freely available online. OpenAlex, the open bibliographic database maintained by OurResearch, lists an article processing charge of £4,050 for this title; that figure is a database listing rather than a publisher quotation, and the current charge, licence options and any funder-compliance arrangements must be confirmed on OUP’s journal pages before submission, because charges change and read-and-publish agreements between OUP and institutions frequently cover the fee for eligible corresponding authors.

Frequency is six issues per year, a schedule reported consistently across subscription and bibliographic sources. The journal publishes in English and is based in the United Kingdom, with OUP’s Oxford office as its publishing home. Print and online ISSNs are distinct — 0007-0955 for print and 1464-3529 for online — and both are recorded in this site’s stored record for the journal, which matches the publisher’s identifiers.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Read Them

OUP states that BJC is a high-impact journal ranked in the top quartile of journals in the Criminology and Penology field in Clarivate’s citation reporting. That is the publisher’s characterisation of the journal’s Journal Citation Reports position and should be read as a category-relative statement: criminology is a comparatively low-citation-density field, so its leading journals post impact factors that look modest beside biomedical titles while being exceptional within their own discipline. Comparing a criminology impact factor directly with one from pharmacology or computer science is a category error.

OpenAlex provides a useful independent cross-check of the journal’s scale and longevity. At the time of verification it indexed roughly 5,985 works for the title, with an h-index of 154 and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.28. Those are database-computed figures, not publisher marketing numbers, and they are consistent with a large, mature journal whose articles accumulate citations over long periods. SCImago, drawing on Scopus data, likewise places the journal in the Law and Criminology and Penology subject areas; readers who need a current quartile for a promotion or accreditation file should take it from the live SCImago or Scopus record for the year in question rather than from any static profile, because quartiles are recomputed annually.

The practical guidance is simple. Use the journal’s reputation and category standing as evidence of selectivity and readership. Use article-level citation counts, where they matter, from the database your institution recognises. And do not let a single metric substitute for reading recent issues: the strongest signal of fit is whether the journal is publishing work your paper is in conversation with.

Prizes and Community Role

OUP notes that BJC has multiple annual awards, including the Radzinowicz Prize, awarded for the paper that most contributes to knowledge of criminal justice issues and the development of criminology. Named prizes of this kind are a small but telling indicator of a journal embedded in its scholarly community: they reward contribution to the field rather than citation performance alone. The journal’s book review section plays a similar community role, keeping readers current with monographs in a discipline where books matter as much as articles — a feature social-science authors consistently undervalue when choosing between journals that review books seriously and those that do not.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

BJC is a strong fit for manuscripts that make a clear, field-level contribution about crime and society: theoretically informed empirical studies, comparative institutional analysis, historical work with present-day resonance, and policy analysis grounded in evidence rather than advocacy. It suits sociologists, legal scholars, psychologists, geographers, historians and political scientists working on crime as much as it suits career criminologists, because its stated scope is organised around problems rather than departmental boundaries.

It is a poor fit for manuscripts whose contribution is purely local and descriptive with no wider claim, for routine evaluations written for a funder rather than a scholarly audience, and for work in forensic science or clinical psychology that touches crime only incidentally; neighbouring specialist journals serve those papers better. Authors should also weigh the hybrid model honestly: if a funder mandates immediate open access and no institutional agreement or budget covers the optional charge, that constraint must be resolved before submission, not after acceptance.

Before You Submit: A Verification Checklist

• Read the current author instructions on Oxford Academic, including anonymisation requirements for double-blind review, word limits and reference style, and confirm them again at submission time.
• Frame the contribution explicitly against OUP’s two stated criteria: new knowledge about crime and society, and quality of argument and presentation.
• Check whether your institution has a read-and-publish agreement with OUP that covers the optional open access charge; if open access matters to you or your funder, establish the current fee from the publisher, not from a database listing.
• Scan the most recent two or three issues to confirm the journal is actively publishing your kind of paper, and cite the BJC literature your work builds on where it genuinely does so.
• Confirm the current editor and board from the journal masthead if you intend to suggest reviewers or raise a query, because rosters change.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The British Journal of Criminology only for British research? No. The title reflects its origins, but OUP describes an international journal publishing work from around the world, and its scope statement addresses crime and society generally, with comparative and non-UK studies a normal part of its content.

What are the journal’s ISSNs? Print ISSN 0007-0955 and online ISSN 1464-3529.

Is the journal open access? It is a hybrid title: subscription publication is the default, and accepted authors may choose a paid open access option. The current charge should be verified with the publisher; a database listing from OpenAlex recorded £4,050 at the time of verification.

How often does it publish? Six issues per year.

What review model does it use? A detailed double-blind peer review process, as described by Oxford University Press.

When was it founded? Its first issue appeared in 1950 under the title British Journal of Delinquency; it adopted the title The British Journal of Criminology in 1960, according to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

Reading the Archive: Why the Back Catalogue Matters

Most journal profiles treat history as decoration. For BJC it is a working resource. Because the journal began in 1950, its archive traces the full arc of post-war thinking about crime: the early dominance of psychoanalytic and treatment-oriented approaches inherited from its founding institute, the labelling and radical criminology movements of later decades, the rise of administrative and situational crime prevention, the cultural turn, and the current preoccupation with data, surveillance and transnational harm. OUP’s anniversary collection, which selected one paper per decade from 1960 onward, was assembled precisely because individual BJC articles have repeatedly set agendas that other journals then followed — the collection highlighted restorative justice scholarship and work on the adverse effects of counterterrorism regulation among its decade-defining pieces. Doctoral students are routinely advised to search this archive before finalising a literature review, not out of piety but because the probability that a supposedly new criminological argument was anticipated in these pages is unusually high.

The archive also has a practical citation implication. Older BJC articles continue to be cited decades after publication, which is one reason database h-index figures for the title are so large relative to its annual output. Authors publishing here are placing work in a venue where the half-life of an article is long; a paper that speaks to a durable question, rather than only to a current policy cycle, can accumulate influence for a generation.

Editorial Standards and Research Ethics

Criminological research frequently involves people in vulnerable positions — prisoners, victims, young people, communities under intensive policing — and a journal of BJC’s standing is expected to police the ethics of what it publishes as carefully as its methods. Authors should expect editorial scrutiny of consent, anonymisation of participants and fieldwork settings, and the handling of data gathered inside institutions such as prisons and courts, and should document ethical approval and safeguards in the manuscript itself rather than waiting to be asked. The double-blind process described by OUP protects authors during review, but it does not dilute these obligations: anonymisation for review and anonymisation of research participants are separate duties, and both must be discharged before submission. Authors working with official statistics or administrative data should likewise be ready to explain access arrangements and any restrictions on sharing, since readers and reviewers increasingly test whether published claims can be inspected or reproduced.

How BJC Sits Among Criminology Journals

Readers often ask how BJC compares with the other generalist titles in the field. The honest answer is that it belongs to a small group of long-established, society- or institution-linked general criminology journals that between them define the discipline’s centre, and that its distinguishing features within that group are its British institutional roots combined with an explicitly international remit, its charity-and-university-press governance, its substantial book review section in a field where monographs carry unusual weight, and its named prizes rewarding contribution to criminal justice knowledge. Journals with a narrower national, methodological or sub-field remit are not lesser venues; they are different instruments. The choice should turn on where a manuscript’s intended readers actually are, and for broadly framed work on crime and society those readers demonstrably include this journal’s.

Assessment

Seventy-five years after its first issue, BJC occupies a position few journals in any field achieve: it helped create its discipline, it still publishes at the discipline’s centre, and its governance — a learned charity working with a university press — aligns its incentives with scholarship rather than volume. Its metrics, read properly within their category, support that standing, and its review process is structured to improve as well as to select. For criminology and its neighbouring fields, it remains one of the definitive venues for work on crime and society, and a journal whose recent issues are required reading for anyone entering the field.