Announcements

Prof. Dr. Daniel McCarthy is Head of Sociology and Professor in Criminology at the University of Surrey. His academic excellence has been recognized with several awards and grants, including funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and Nuffield Foundation. He has also received awards including the British Society of Criminology (Policing Network) award and the Vice Chancellor’s “Researcher of the Year” Award. He also was co-awarded the Faculty Teacher of the Year Prize.

His research focuses on policing, inter-agency collaboration, and the social impacts of incarceration, particularly on prisoner–family relationships. He employs cross-national comparative approaches in his work. Prof. Dr. McCarthy is the author of notable works such as “Soft Policing: The Collaborative Control of Anti-Social Behaviour” (2014) and the co-authored ”The Impact of Youth Imprisonment on the Lives of Parents” (2023).

Prof. Dr. McCarthy has developed extensive editorial experience within the academic publishing ecosystem. Effective January 2026, he will formally assume the role of Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Social Sciences, providing strategic leadership to the publication. Prior to this promotion, he served as a member of the Editorial Board and later as the Editor-in-Chief for the “Crime and Justice” Section, contributing significantly to the journal’s development in his field of expertise.

The following is an interview with Prof. Dr. Daniel McCarthy:

1. Looking back at your career, was there a specific moment or a catalyst that drew you into the field of criminology and eventually led you to academic publishing?
After I graduated as an undergraduate student, I did a social science degree. Like many students, I needed money and I went off to find a job that paid reasonably well and allowed me to soak up some of the debt that I’d accumulated. I worked as a researcher in a local authority for about a year and a half or something like that, which was really insightful for me because it allowed me an opportunity to talk to policymakers, practitioners, and get an insight into the reality of life on the ground, so to speak.
There were people calling in, making complaints about criminal matters, civil matters, dealing with all different agencies, the police, probation services, youth offending teams and so on. So, it allowed me to have a hands-on insight into the inner workings of the system in a sense. And because I was just coming out of an undergrad degree, I was learning quickly. I was trying to keep my ears and eyes open just to understand everything. It allowed me to take a step back and think about some of the things I learned as a student.
And that’s when I had a bit of time to think about what I wanted to do next, because the PhD, if I’m honest, as an undergraduate, doing a PhD wasn’t even something I really understood. I had no idea what this was. I had no family members who had been near a university before. So, it was an opportunity for me to think about, given this experience that you’ve had, what is there about this experience that might then allow you to go back and study again and do a PhD?
So, I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship and started with an MSc in research methodology, and after that, I carried over into the PhD. So, I think looking back on it that year and a half out of academia, it was a real blessing for me in terms of just having the time to be able to see things differently. So that’s where my career started. Really. That was the moment. It wasn’t really a particular event as such. It was more a series of events or processes that happened that changed how I saw things. So that’s where it all started.
The publishing side of things was also something that, again, as an undergrad, I would look at papers and look at authors like superstars in a way. I was a bit starstruck. How can these amazing people write these papers and books? I felt very disconnected from the reality of who these people were until I got more in the system as a PhD student. I would attend conferences, and then when I got my first academic job, I was already publishing. So, I knew that the reality of academia was quite a lot different from this fictional representation that I’d created as an undergrad.
So, the first take-home message for me really was that academics are normal human beings. They’re very smart, they’re very capable, but at the same time we’re human, and that was something that I always tried to take through my career, really.  We need to create an academic culture that can be honourable, respectful, caring, but critical and fair at the same time. And so that’s where I started to create my value system as an academic from those initial years in the Academy.

2. Regarding your background in criminology and more specifically, how has this background influenced the way you approach editorial decision making and the scientific regard that you employ?
It’s a really important question. The academic journey I’ve had, it’s been a strange one in many respects because I started off as somebody who was really interested in criminological theory, social theory, philosophy—very qualitative. A lot of the work I was doing was quite ethnographic, qualitative interview-based, and that informed my epistemological status, really, as a scholar. I was doing lots of work in that and publishing. But gradually I also recognised that my skill base was a bit broader than that and I wanted to learn different skills, which generally I think is quite rare for academics as they get through their careers. It’s generally something you do earlier on.
We had COVID in 2020 and I was sat at home and in this situation of being a qualitative researcher who didn’t really know what to do—I was a little bit lost, to be honest. I’m surrounded by some good friends and colleagues who are very numerically sound. And we had some conversations, and I decided to give the statistics a go. I’d learned it... I’d always had reasonable training in statistics and particularly regression modelling, things like that. But I properly put my head down during 2020 and started to learn things.
I spent a lot of time watching tutorials, making mistakes, learning things, trialing things, and so I ended up in a situation where I became reasonably competent with statistics. So, as a qualitative researcher, I could also understand and judge statistical research pretty well.  I wouldn’t put myself in the category of some of my colleagues who are far more advanced than me, but certainly from the basis of being able to work and understand the principles of statistics and conduct analysis, looking back, I’ve made a lot of progress.
From the perspective of reviewing papers, it’s really important because I get papers across my desk that are from a whole multitude of different areas, subject matters, methodologies, and being able to understand and embrace those differences is important. I think something that I’ve taken really seriously in my career is to be able to properly review and understand the basis by which people are making their arguments, interpretations, inferences, etc.

3. How do you define the importance of Open Access specifically within the context of criminology and justice studies?
To define the importance of Open Access, I think the main thing to say really is that academia was, and has historically been, a fairly exclusive pastime that’s reserved only for like-minded fellows who live in the “ivory towers” of universities and other specialist organisations. And I think as I’ve gone from my career, we do a lot more work with policymakers, with practitioners, with charities and having work that’s accessible, that they can download, they can read, they can understand, is really important if we’re going to try and make those connections with policy and practice, especially.
Some of what I do, especially in United Kingdom—I’m not so confident about other countries—but there’s been a big drive in the UK in the last 20 years or so around research impact and that broadly involves research that should make a real-world difference in some way, shape or form. It might be changing opinions, it might be impacting practices, it might be trying to shape policy. But in order to do that, you need accessible ideas. They’re [practitioners, policy makers] not having to go to a dusty library and dig out a copy of a journal that might be hidden away there; it needs to be work that people can access.
And indeed, in the world we live in now, it’s such that so much of what we do is online and so much of what we do involves people doing quick desk-based searches, which includes charities, think tanks, NGOs and so on. And that work and the accessibility of that work is really important for that purpose.

4. Do you believe the move towards open science changes the relationship between the researcher and the public? If so, how should our journal adapt to facilitate this connection?
Yeah. There’s certainly different levels of adoption around open science. And I think scholars should be able to make decisions on the levels that they feel comfortable engaging in. And it does depend somewhat upon the kind of research that you undertake. But I think the principles of it are admirable in terms of, like I said before, having some kind of connection between research that’s transparent, clear, can be replicated, etc.
And again, that does depend somewhat on the type of work you’re doing. Let’s say, if you’re doing a meta-analysis—perhaps more common in psychology, medical sciences, etc.—then that’s a fairly normal process in terms of the transparency of the methodology, so it does depend. But I think it’s a principle. Again, going back to the points I raised about impact, it leads towards this argument that we need to have research that’s more transparent, open and accessible for people to scrutinize fairly.

5. Now that you have moved from an Editorial Board Member to a Section Editor-in-Chief and now to the Editor-in-Chief, what is the most valuable lesson that you learned running our “Crime and Justice” Section? And what will you bring with yourself in this role as Editor-in-Chief?
I think the first thing I learned quickly was just the processes involved in terms of reviewing and editing, I mean, knowing how the journal operates through its review process, knowing how the editorial teams work, learning a little bit about the mechanics of the journal and the systems that are used. So, that was the first thing. It’s just like any new immersion in a process; it’s about learning. It’s about learning what’s behind the mechanics, so that was something that I learned quickly, and that’s helped me a lot. So, while running the Section, I think I learned a lot.
With the types of articles that are coming in, you start to get a sense of the differences and the trends and the kind of areas that are being focused on perhaps more than others. The Special Issues were something that I placed quite a lot of emphasis upon because I think that’s where some of the really interesting ideas emerge from, because there’s usually a community of scholars that are talking, and when you’ve got that fairly open dialogue, that’s where you can start to problem solve, work on ideas, work through challenges and figure out, really...what’s the sort of movement, what’s the kind of core challenges within that particular subdiscipline that we can start to understand. So that was something that I really learned a lot from.
I think the other things that are important to recognise as well are, how do you work around some of the challenges that exist when you’ve got quite opposing perspectives from reviewers? And that’s something we need to look at really carefully, and we do look at it incredibly carefully. Some journals have operated from the basis of rejecting anything that dissents from the core message of a reviewer, which is to say, if there’s one opposing reviewer, you might reject the whole paper. There are some legitimate situations where that might happen. But I think one of the things we’ve taken quite carefully and cautiously as a journal is to look at the fairness of those processes. Has there been a fair process? Has there been a fair adjudication for our authors? And that’s something I think is really important to honour. So, there needs to be some level of transparency, but there also needs to be a level of understanding across our review team. So that’s something that we’ve tried to work quite hard on.
Going into the Editor-in-Chief post, I think the big thing that I bring to it is somebody who’s got a good understanding of the social sciences. I work in the Department of Sociology. I’m surrounded by people who do work across so many different areas from media and communications, different methodological areas, in areas of sociology, inequality, social media, criminology, and having that kind of eclectic base of experiences has allowed me to understand the differences within the social sciences, and also why interdisciplinarity is so important. Although throughout my career, I’ve published predominantly in the area of criminology, I’ve always been somebody who would regard themselves more as a social scientist. So, I think that helps me in terms of being able to recognise the rich diversity of work that gets submitted to the journal.

6. What are your immediate priorities for the journal in the coming year?
I’ve written up these in terms of the Annual Report that’s due to be released soon. There are three things.
The first thing is that we’re in an incredibly scary, turbulent world at the moment, and we’re facing all sorts of challenges as human beings navigating this world that we can’t really control. One of the best ways of controlling this in our own heads really is to understand and to be critical, including valuing the freedom to publish. By having accessibility in research, we can actually cut through some of the noise that’s all around us, whether it be misinformation, fake news, all these sorts of quite negative aspects of the world we live in, and that comes partly from the space, the pace of life being so quick—people don’t always have time to understand and deconstruct. But as scholars, we’ve got a duty, I think, to be critical and to be open, and to ask the difficult questions and to debate ideas. And that’s our role, really: to not just operate purely within our “ivory tower”, but do something that can actually help everyday people work through these challenges, work through this minefield of complexity when it comes to what’s going on in the world. So, I think our first priority as an academy, we’ve got a duty to be critical and to help understand and interpret this quite turbulent world that’s going on around us.
On a more local level, so to speak, I think one of the other things that I’m really keen to try and develop is the fact that, broadly speaking, the social sciences are, I would say, predominantly concentrated on what I would call Anglophone countries, for the most part. That is partly because that’s where the money is, and it’s also where the universities have had a stronger legacy over many years. So, it’s a product of these sorts of processes. But increasingly we’re starting to see research developed in other countries in the world, other continents in the world, and I think those ideas are really fascinating for us because we’ve traditionally created ideas on the back of research that’s been primarily undertaken in a handful of countries. And whilst it may be the case that there’s some replication of those trends and patterns in other countries that might be outside of those geopolitical territories, I think we also have this amazing opportunity to be able to build new theories, to challenge, deconstruct, unpack, assess if these theories apply, or do they not apply? What seems to be some of the ways we can interpret those differences or those similarities? So that comparative lens, and looking at countries which I, and other scholars, term the Global South, is something that I think is really important in terms of development of ideas, so that’s something I’m excited by, and let’s hope that that continues to progress.
The final thing is early-career academics. In the United Kingdom—I can comment on this with more authority—the university system has been quite up and down for the last few years. There have been challenges. It’s been tough. It’s been a tough place for many academics to operate in because of job cuts, because of the uncertainty of the system. But early-career scholars are a really important part of that story because their careers depend so heavily upon opportunities, and I’d like to be able to offer as many opportunities as we can to early-career scholars. Whether it be as Special Issue editors, whether it be as authors, reviewers—all sorts of opportunities hopefully lie ahead for us. When I’m long retired, they’re the people who are going to be coming through. So, I think we need to be able to offer an opportunity for such scholars to be able to develop from that supportive infrastructure.

7. How do you see yourself maintaining the journal’s traditions balanced with necessary innovations?
Obviously one of the core goals of the journal is to maintain its Open Access credentials and to develop that further, hopefully, more in the years to come. I think the other thing that’s also part of that too is to do with the quality and having high quality articles that can hopefully take us into the Q1 category. That will be fabulous for the journal obviously. And at the moment, I think we’re quite close to it, aren’t we? So hopefully that’s something we can get to in the next few years.
I think, going back to the points I just raised a moment ago, I think one is obviously the fact that we’re developing our journal to be more accessible to different corners of the world and doing our best to highlight that work and build bridges in terms of the ways it might offer insights into theory, practice and so on. So, that’s something I think is really important. The critical emphasis as well, it might be something that we look at with Special Issues, thematic type additions, etc. How can we really start to open up arguments around these important questions as social scientists and as human beings? Frankly, these are bigger than just our ideas. I think these, in many cases, are the matters of safety, of humanity, of our futures as humans, so there are profound questions to ask around that kind of work.
And I think there also needs to be a recognition of early-career researchers from what they offer. There are ideas that we’re looking at at the moment that I hope will develop some further opportunities for early-career scholars to be more involved in the journal, to develop their skills, etc.

8. What impact do you hope to leave on the journal and the community if you were ever to look at your tenure as Editor-in-Chief?
There’s bigger machinery than me operating. We’ve got a wonderful editorial team, we’ve got a team of reviewers who are fabulous, we’ve got great editorial assistants, journal managers, everything else. So, I’m just one part of that story. So, within the scope of that, I think one of the things I’d like to say I’d done would be to honour the things I mentioned already. I think we have developed a journal that can be open, critical, ask difficult questions, create debate, create connections with the public, and that might be where we look at the analytics of our submissions, what’s getting picked up by media, how is it informing media? And that’s not to say that every piece of research should do that, but it’s to say that if we can see an increase in that, then that means clearly that we’re doing something that’s getting to everyday people, which is a good thing, I think, for the most part.
The second thing is the importance of developing more ideas from other countries, a greater diversity of countries involved in development of research. And we’ve already seen that there have been some countries that have increased quite considerably in the take up; we talked about Spain earlier on. There are a few other countries as well that are starting to increase their submissions. So that kind of trend is something that’s encouraging, and we’d like to see more of that. We need richer ideas from other parts of the world because they are fundamentally quite different societies in some cases, and the social sciences is about understanding these sorts of questions around difference and comparability. And challenging some of the principles, some of the theories that we’ve developed as an academy. I think this is only going to happen when we start to do more of that really rich comparative research. So that’s something that I think I’d like to see at the end of my tenure, so to speak.
And then finally, I think just giving opportunities to early-career researchers as well, as I’ve already mentioned before. Speaking from a personal perspective as a former ECR (Early-Career Researcher), coming through, I’d love to have had more opportunities. I didn’t necessarily have all these until a bit later in my career, but I think they would have helped me enormously in terms of confidence, in terms of understanding the mechanics of a journal, how things work, how research works, how reviewing works, and so I think, given the fact that these are the people who are going to be hopefully taking over in the years to come, we need to do our best as scholars to be able to offer a fair, respectful, supportive platform for those people to be able to develop.

We wish Prof. Dr. Daniel McCarthy every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.