Abstract
The American Journal of Agricultural Economics reached its 100th volume this year. We take this landmark volume as an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of this leading field journal—and one of the original research journals in economics. We document changes in the editorial structure of the journal—from a sole editor-in-chief to the present system of four rotating co-editors—and in the management of the publication process overseen by these editors. Using bibliometric analysis, we then track various trends in the journal over the past century. We assess changes in the structure of articles, including increased article length, reliance on mathematical modeling and empirical analysis, and the dramatic rise in collaborative publication in the form of expanding co-author teams. We also explore changes in the degree of topical specialization and the geographic coverage of research published in AJAE. We use co-authoring relationships to construct collaboration networks specific to the journal and document the striking increase in the density of these networks. We conclude with some perspectives on the implications of this century-long evolution of the journal for the coming decades of pushing and publishing the frontiers of the profession.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1253-1274 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| Journal | American Journal of Agricultural Economics |
| Volume | 100 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Travis J. Lybbert and Timothy K.M. Beatty are professors in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California (UC), Davis. Terrance M. Hurley is the Austin A. Dowell Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Timothy J. Richards is the Marvin and June Morrison Chair in Agribusiness at Arizona State University. The authors thank the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Board for providing financial support for research assistance. Junjun Dong and Daniel Putman, Ph.D. students at UC Davis, provided essential and excellent research assistance for which we are grateful. We also thank Oxford University Press for facilitating this analysis by providing access to their digital archive of AJAE and their citations data. Correspondence may be sent to: tlybbert@ucdavis.edu.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Applied economics
- Bibliometric analysis
- Collaboration networks
- Editorial structure
- Professional communication