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As a means for measuring scholarly influence, citation analysis has several limitations and shortcomings. We first review the main sources of citation data (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and information collected directly from reference lists) and discuss the shortcomings of each source. Next, we review five significant limitations of citation analysis as a methodology (academic over popular interest, various motivations for citing, manipulation potential, failure to account for author ordering, and citations only appearing in “indexed” journals). The issues we touch on set the stage for the remainder of the articles in this special issue.

Criminal justice and criminology (CCJ), like many academic disciplines, conducts its share of rankings. Citation-based ranks of individual scholars are particularly popular, and they tend to consistently identify the field’s supposedly “top” scholars and “academic stars.” Whether citations equate with “influence,” however, is up for debate. At the least, citation-based metrics are unidimensional and fail to capture attention outside academia. Accordingly, we drew on the work of Cohn et al. and re-ranked top-cited scholars using the Google Chrome “Altmetric it!” bookmarklet. As expected, the Altmetrics methodology fundamentally altered past rankings. The most influential scholars in our rankings, Terrie E. Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, received higher Altmetric scores than all the remaining ranked scholars combined.

In Kyllo v. United States, the Supreme Court handed down an apparently bright-line rule stating that government use of devices not in “general public use” (e.g., thermal imagers), which can be used to view the “details of a home,” constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. This article argues that the Court’s decision is flawed for several reasons: (a) There is no agreement over the “general public use” standard, (b) there is no agreement over what can be considered “details of the home,” (c) the Court failed to exercise judicial restraint, (d) the Court restricted law enforcement officials’ ability to draw “inferences” about criminal activity, and perhaps most important, (e) the decision does not place restrictions on the use of thermal imagers for other law enforcement purposes besides the direct procurement of criminal evidence.