John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

   

Findings Bolster Quality of the College’s Forensic Psychology Program

New York, NY, March 22, 2011 -- The scholarly credentials of John Jay College faculty members have been resoundingly reaffirmed in a new study that examined the institutional affiliations of authors published in three top forensic psychology journals.

Mary E. Schnorf and Jeffrey L. Helms of Kennesaw State University in Georgia analyzed 554 articles published from 2004 to 2008 in the refereed journals Law and Human Behavior, Behavioral Sciences and the Law and Psychology, Public Policy and Law, and found that John Jay ranked third in the number of faculty members listed as authors of non-duplicative articles. Twenty different John Jay faculty authors were identified as having produced the journal articles.

“This is a great honor for John Jay College. It is a testament to the hard work of the faculty in the Psychology Department and the quality of their research" said Karen Terry, Interim Associate Provost and Dean of Research at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Schnorf and Helms presented their findings at a poster session during the Fourth International Congress on Psychology and the Law, held this March in Miami, FL. “When preparing to apply to graduate school or other training programs, it is important to know which programs provide quality training and extensive research opportunities to their students or interns,” the researchers observed. “The current research provides an objective measure of forensic psychology research settings (e.g., graduate training programs) based on data from the top journals that publish exclusively forensic psychology research.”

The findings should help both potential graduate students and potential faculty job applicants in objectively evaluating a school, according to the researchers.

The number of different authors at John Jay — more than any school in the final rankings — and the fact that they were represented in all three major journals sends another important message, the researchers suggested. Unlike John Jay, institutions showing multiple articles but only a few authors “potentially communicate that research and the prestige associated with it may be credited more to a specific author rather than to a particular affiliation…. A more diverse range of journals and authors communicates an explicit message about the potential quality of the affiliation itself and the commitment to forensic psychology research.”

Established in 1964, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York is an international leader in educating for justice. It offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu.