Marc F. Bellemare Posts

The graduate student section (GSS) of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association had asked my Ohio State colleague Brian Roe, co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics,  to present on the topic of how to publish in academic journals at a GSS-organized session on academic communication at last week’s annual meetings in Minneapolis.

Because his flight was leaving too early to allow him to do so, Brian asked me to sub for him. Here are my slides for that talk, in .pdf format. Because of my audience, this is agricultural-and-applied-economics-centric, but I think those of you in other fields of economics and in other disciplines can find something useful in there.

From the ISI Web of Knowledge Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of agricultural economics journals:

1. Food Policy 2.331
2. European Review of Agricultural Economics 1.467
3. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 1.363
4. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 1.328
5. Agricultural Economics 1.085

The number to the right of each journal name is the journal’s impact factor, which has been calculated on the basis of calendar year 2013 citation numbers.

This has been a very good year for agricultural economics journals. I know for one that the impact factors for Food Policy and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) have both increased. I am proud to serve as associate editor at both journals.

That is but one top 5, however. Bear in mind that the rank ordering might differ significantly depending on what other indicators of quality you look at, or whether you consider reputation. In agricultural and applied economics departments, for example, many people still consider the AJAE as the no-contest top journal in the field, no matter what impact factors may say.

ht: Bhavani Shankar.

The 2014 annual meetings of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), which were held in Minneapolis this year, ended last night.

This was a busy conference for me given that I was presenting at three different sessions — a session on frontier topics in international development, which I organized and where I presented some preliminary results of the work I have been doing in Ethiopia with former colleagues; a session on agricultural policy, where I presented my work with Nick Carnes on why members of Congress support agricultural protection; and a session for graduate students, where I gave my thoughts about how to publish in academic journals. And if I had the gift of ubiquity, I would’ve presented in a fourth session, but thank God for coauthors.

The high point of the conference for me personally was the awards ceremony, where I received the AAEA’s Quality of Research Discovery award, which is the Association’s highest honor awarded to a piece of research. From the AAEA website: