Cybercrime and Artificial Intelligence in Criminological Research: Early Signals from ASC Conference Abstracts, 2014–2024

Cybercrime and artificial intelligence are increasingly reshaping both the nature of crime and the methods used to study it. Understanding how these developments emerge within criminological scholarship is important for anticipating future directions in applied security research. This study examines thematic and methodological trends in 16,659 paper abstracts submitted to the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology between 2014 and 2024. Conference abstracts offer a useful vantage point for detecting early-stage research agendas because they capture emerging topics and methodological innovation before journal publication. Using computational text analysis and topic modeling, the study identifies patterns of continuity and change in criminological research during a decade marked by rapid digitalization and the disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal two parallel developments: traditional areas such as criminological theory, policing, and courts remain central, while cybercrime and artificial intelligence are emerging as increasingly prominent frontiers. In particular, cybercrime research accelerates after 2020 and increasingly emphasizes hacking, malware, and data breaches. These findings suggest that criminology is undergoing a significant transition in which digital threats and computational methods are becoming more central to the study of crime and justice.