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Text Box: Most certainly, classifying articles (or abstracts) published in mainstream journals and clustering their contents will help confirm the impression of bias. Yet, estimations of bias would still require special effort at identifying who and what is being excluded from these journals.3 Proper estimations are especially important because the exclusion of critical ideas and scholars is partly produced by a ‘mobilization of bias,’ which assumes that the political ideas, theoretical discourse and empirical findings of critical criminologists are so utopian, wrong or unimportant that reviewers do not have to take them seriously. 4 Such ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions are sometimes expressed in reviewers’ comments but they are usually unexpressed even though they enforce the exclusion of critical articles. Specifying who and what is being excluded from mainstream publications is further complicated by the fact that some members of the Division frequently write articles within the prevailing limits of dissent tolerated in mainstream circles; consequently, their articles sometimes appear in mainstream journals too. This additional complication introduces the necessity for distinguishing unacceptable articles, from mainstream points of view, from acceptable ones even when both may have been written by the same persons. Dealing with these difficulties would require comparing groups of scholars and writings that distinguish critical scholarship from its mainstream counterparts. Independent journals such as Critical Criminology, Social Justice, Humanity and Society or Crime, Law and Social Change could provide considerable data for these comparisons.5 The citation study of critical authors by David Friedrichs and Richard Wright might also be used to advantage. Still other journals and anthologies – conventional or not - can be tapped. Division members might be polled for critical authors and articles. Further options include Division members’ experiences when submitting articles for review. We all have stories to tell in this regard, some more outrageous than others. Clarification of what critical criminology is about could be a by-product of this kind of study. Given the stranglehold of structural functionalism and shallow empiricism on Criminology, critical discourse might be identified more by what the members of the Division oppose rather than what they endorse. Yet, we think that an identifiable ensemble of outlooks toward social

Text Box: justice, justice policy, social theory and research methods, among other things, also marks members of the Division and positions them at the frontiers of our discipline, in distinction to people who cling to ideas that have little heuristic value or should have been abandoned a long time ago. Also, while some strategies have been offered for conducting a study on the issue of bias in review processes, we would like to raise an alternative question: Why bother? The argument presented to the membership seems to assume that publishing in mainstream journals is more valuable than publishing in critical journals because greater prestige is conferred on mainstream journals. In this view, a publication in Criminology or Justice Quarterly counts more than a publication in Critical Criminology, Social Justice, Humanity and Society, Theoretical Criminology or Crime, Law and Social Change. Certainly, most of us work in departments where this kind of criteria is employed for annual evaluations and promotion and tenure. But, this standard while unavoidable is also at the heart of the debate. It should also be questioned because of its problematic value from a scientific or social policy standpoint. After all, our publishing concerns cannot, in the last analysis, be justified by a stand that merely calls for fair play in representing scholars who have alternative points of view. The lack of critical articles in Criminology requires more, for instance, because it is being produced by the witting or unwitting repression of significant contributions to science or social policy. For example, Ellen Cohn and David Farrington (1990) have asserted that publications are highly cited because they make a scientific contribution to knowledge.6 According to their logic, since Travis Hirschi received far more citations than any other author in Criminology, his contributions to scientific knowledge and the quality of his research as well as his prestige exceeded that achieved by all other American (and even British) criminologists during the period under study. But the Schwendingers (1997) maintain that even though professional eminence may be validly indexed by citations, the value of scientific contributions cannot be indexed by citations based on publications in