This article seems to me to be a sales pitch, which makes me think that Dr. Rowbotham wrote the historical context for the article and Dr. Clayton built up the

This article seems to me to be a sales pitch, which makes me think that Dr. Rowbotham wrote the historical context for the article and Dr. Clayton built up the scientific portion. I'd call shenanigans, except the article was originally published in three parts by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (which is refereed), so I'm just calling shenani. Since I am (or was) an historian I'm going to look at Dr. Rowbotham to see if I can make sense of her motivations for writing this paper.* That might help us understand why an historian would even consent to publish an article like this. At first glance, things don't look good. She's working in the school of business at Plymouth, which is weird, but perhaps that figures in to her interests in crime? She co-founded the SOLON institute, which has been the vehicle for publishing some of her work. Her work has been published by several journals and publishers, but generally they're not that great. The SOLON institute is also led by what most academics in English would consider "tier 3" universities, at best. She just looks like a fringe academic. But then we dive deeper into her resume. She was a Reader at Nottingham Trent Uni. Now, Nottingham is nothing to write home about, but being a Reader is-- in the US it's the equivalent of being an Associate Professor. Now she's a Visiting Research Fellow, which is usually a stipended position and allows the researcher to work solely on ... research. That means that her project, whatever it is, at the very least was interesting and viable to the University of Plymouth. So that's worth knowing, because even at low level universities research fellowships are desirable. I think that this line from her bio may be key: "My research focus consequently shifted to 'bad' behaviour, and I began to develop my interdisciplinary credentials as a lawyer and criminologist as well as a historian of crime." After publishing her PhD thesis in 1989 she doesn't appear to have produced much research. Then in 2010 everything picks up. When seeing vitae gaps like this on the resume of a female professor the assumption of most (male) academics is that she was raising children, and that's probably true, but she also made a pivot in her career to law and criminology, which further interrupted her career. She is likely a very rare creature in British academia: a generalist. That's the sort of thing that's horrible for a career in the UK, but may very well make her an excellent teacher and a great resource if you're into crime and law in Victorian England. I can't say of course. One thing I do know is that it's good (for the historical profession) to have historians reaching across fields and asking these sorts of questions. So, Dr. Clayton notwithstanding, this may very well be a worthwhile endeavor. I think we'd all like some corroboration, though, because the article itself is pretty shaky. I wonder if Dr. Rowbotham's training gave her an understanding of statistics. * In theory someone could just ask, but then that wouldn't require the kind of qualitative analysis that historians do so well!