Reflections On Relevance Of Professional Journals

It appears the major private benefit from peer reviewed journals such as the Review of Agricultural Economics (RAE) is certification. To maintain public support for our journals, increased efforts are needed to demonstrate the social benefits from peer reviewed publications. Research cost considerations have led agricultural economists to emphasize applied disciplinary work using secondary data and to ignore the important work of careful data collection and reporting. Moreover, pressures to publish have led to more isolated research efforts ignoring other disciplines. Recommendations to improve the relevance of journal publications include more active efforts by journal editors to make applied journals such as RAE more accessible to the public.