Data and Research on Human Trafficking
Goździak & Bump
Disciplinary Focus As shown in Table 1, 115 articles or 53 percent of the journal articles fall into the social sciences category, while 110 or 51 percent fall into the law/criminal justice category. Three of the reviewed articles are classified as medical paper and additional three as unknown. The distribution shown in Table 1 indicates that the non-empirical nature of trafficking research is prevalent across academic disciplines. Table 1: Categorization of Journal Articles by Empirical Nature/Peer Review and Discipline Discipline
Criminal Justice/Law
Medicine
Social Sciences
Unknown
Total
Empirical Research Not Peer Reviewed
1
0
2
0
3
Empirical Research - Peer Reviewed
7
7
30
0
44
Not Empirical Research Not Peer Reviewed
74
0
11
2
87
Not Empirical Research Peer Reviewed
28
1
72
1
102
Total
110
8
115
3
236
*Totals presented in this table exceed the actual number of journal articles due to multiple categorizations (i.e. a single journal article could be categorized under both “Criminal Justice/Law” and “Social Sciences”).
The largest concentration of social science articles is based on non-empirical research and is published in peer review journals; 72 or 65 percent of the social science journal articles are based on non-empirical research and are published in peer-reviewed journals. An additional 11 articles based on non-empirical research are published in journals that have not undergone a peer-review process. Thirty two social science journal articles are based on empirical research; with two exceptions, all are published in peer-reviewed journals. The category law/criminal justice includes a total of 110 journal articles. The majority of these articles are not based on empirical research; a total of 102 articles are nonempirically based. Of these 102 articles 74 are published in journals—mainly law journals—which do not use a peer review process, while 28 are published in peerreviewed journals. Needless to say, the preponderance of law/criminal justice articles analyzes the various legal provisions related to prevention of human trafficking, protection of victims, and prosecution of perpetrators. While eight journal articles deal with medical issues and human trafficking, only three are solely devoted to discussion of medical problems faced by trafficked victims. Seven 28 http://isim.georgetown.edu