Twenty-five years on:a bibliographic analysis of articles appearing in the International Journal of Police Science & Management

From a corpus of 678 articles appearing in the International Journal of Police Science & Management representing 25 years of publication, This article reviews the achievements of the Journal's founding principles. Aiming to be multidisciplinary, international and collaborative, with particular emphasis on diversity and operational issues, the Journal also sought to present research informing both policy and practice. A bibliographic analysis revealed 45 police jurisdictions, 41 cognate disciplines and 150 topics covered. The majority of articles (79%) were empirical papers of which 69% derived from primary, 26% secondary and 5% mixed research designs. Around one-fifth of papers related to police management issues, one-third to police deployments and policing practices, and one in ten papers were devoted to accountability and misconduct. Diversity featured in about one-third of papers with gender being the most referred to, whereas disability, religion and sexuality were barely referenced. The majority of articles (77%) were by those from academic institutions with relatively few police/academic collaborating authors. The article concludes with a brief assessment and discussion of the future direction of policing research.