Editorial

• DOI: 10.1177/1098611119826730
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Subject Matter: Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

John L. Worrall

1

Welcome to Volume 22 of Police Quarterly (PQ). It has been some time since my

last editorial, so what follows is a brief restatement of journal policies and an

update on recent developments and trends affecting the journal. Editorial pol-

icies remain essentially unchanged and are as follows:

•Scholarship must be original and should invoke the scientific method. PQ is a

scholarly journal that publishes empirical studies on issues related to policing.

Traditional social scientific methods and reporting practices are preferred.

•Papers must have clear policy relevance, and authors must devote careful

attention to them. As always, a sizable portion of PQ’s readership consists

of law enforcement executives, so the research must be of interest to—and

hopefully useable by—practitioners working in the field.

•The journal generally does not publish descriptive studies and think pieces. It

also refrains from publishing perceptions-oriented research (e.g., citizen per-

ceptions of police), focusing instead on the actual and the applied.

Also consistent with past practice, the journal makes liberal use of desk

rejections. This is done for two reasons, namely to speed up the review process

and ensure reviewers’ valuable time is spent reading papers with the greatest

potential for publication.

In terms of changes, the journal has since 2010 benefitted from an impact

factor. The 2017 impact factor was 1.865; the 5-year impact factor was 2.283. By

both measures, PQ is the ranking policing journal. What is more, it ranked 20th

out of the 61 journals in the 2017 Criminology and Penology category.

Another change I have observed is that it is getting more and more difficult to

secure reviews. For every one reviewer who agrees to evaluate a paper, three to

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The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

John L. Worrall, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA.

Email: worrall@utdallas.edu

Police Quarterly

2019, Vol. 22(1) 3–4

!The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/1098611119826730

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