Using Citations to Evaluate the Quality of Agricultural Economics Journals

Evaluating the quality of agricultural economics journals usually involves a subjective process based on the reputations of one's colleagues. Total citations and citations per article are commonly used in economics and other subject areas to classify journals. Citation data are commonly available in such publications as the Social Science Citation Index. Many agricultural economics journals are not included in the index, and so cannot be ranked on the basis of citations. To overcome this limitation, I employed an underused resource (my teenage son) to summarize all citations published in the 1992–93 issues of nineteen agricultural economics journals. I then used the citation data to rank the nineteen journals. The results were largely as expected, but with some surprises. As expected, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics were highly ranked. Two specialty journals, the Agricultural Finance Review and the Journal of Agricultural Cooperatives, also yielded high citation rates per article. These results suggest that, in an era of shrinking professional membership, some agricultural economics journals might enhance their chances for long-term survival by specializing in a topic area, particularly one that reaches nonagricultural economist audiences.