Current Criminology: A Global Home for Theory, Reproducible Evidence, and Humane Science

Abstract

Current Criminology is launched as a global venue for criminological scholarship that travels across countries, methods, and disciplines while remaining accountable to the moral stakes of crime and social control. The journal aims to advance understanding, measurement, and humane responses to crime, harm, and justice by rewarding credible inference and cumulative learning rather than trend-driven novelty. It welcomes theoretically ambitious contributions—new frameworks, mechanism-focused syntheses, and concept clarification—alongside rigorous empirical studies using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs. A central commitment is reproducibility: authors are encouraged to share data, code, and materials when ethically and legally feasible, and to provide transparent documentation and robustness checks when sharing is constrained. To strengthen criminology’s evidentiary foundations, the journal values both technical replications that verify published results and enhanced replications that improve measurement, test robustness, extend to new contexts, or deploy alternative identification strategies. Current Criminology is constitutively international and equity-oriented, seeking to decenter a narrow set of “default” cases and to engage scholarship from underrepresented regions and communities as sources of conceptual innovation. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged, including research using computational social science, artificial intelligence, and modern causal inference tools, provided claims remain interpretable and ethically grounded. Through demanding yet humane peer review, the journal aspires to build a scientifically credible, globally inclusive criminology worthy of public trust.