What’s “Your First Five”?
It turns out that there’s a LOT of new crime research published every day
Your First Five is an almost-daily column that consists of a list of five new criminology & criminal justice research studies (or studies relevant to those disciplines).
And when I say “new”, I mean new. These studies are usually published within the last three days before being shared in Your First Five.
They’re online-first articles published by reputable scholarly journals. I monitor thirty of them for new research.
Some days, there are fewer than five new studies to share. Frequently, there are far more than five and I have to choose which ones to share.
Why “first”?
The idea is to inform readers of some of the newest research available, but also to entice some of them into seeking out further new research.
If you’re not sure where to start, you can see more recent research in recent columns or on my blog.
When is Your First Five published?
Your First Five is published Monday through Friday, excluding Canadian holidays, and usually by 2 p.m. E.S.T.
To never miss a Your First Five column, follow Understand Crime and then sign up to get new articles by email.
Why do some of the older posts refer to something called “True Crime Adjacent” and “Nonfiction Crime Writing”?
Those were two publications that I owned and cancelled in September 2023. The first for lack of alignment with my writing goals, the second because it overlapped with a weekly newsletter I was putting out and neither was quite what I wanted them to be.
Why does each column use the same text?
You noticed that, eh?
I think the value in these columns comes from the curation of the new studies, not in the prose used to share them. So, I use a template to free up time that I think is better spent working on in-depth articles.
As an emerging science journalist who covers crime research, I monitor key relevant journals for new research to write about. Your First Five is almost a byproduct of that process.
