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2014 Year in Review

Impact of Academic Journals

Dan Rigby, Michael Burton, and I just published an article in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics on the impact of academic journals - as seen through the eyes of the academics who write journal articles.  

Motivating the work is the fact that more emphasis is being placed on the "impact" or our academic work.  This can be see most directly in places like the UK where funding directly follows measures of impact.  At my own University, we have to write annual "impact statements", and it is commonplace in promotion and tenure decisions for candidates to have to document "impact."  One of the most common metrics used to identify impact is the Impact Factor of the journal in which an author's article appears.  This impact factor is calculated by measuring citations to articles published in a journal in the two years following the publication date.  There are many critiques of the use of the Impact Factor, and my own research with Tia Hilmer shows that using the impact factor of a journal to measure the impact of a particular article is potentially misleading: some articles published in low Impact Factor journals receive many more citations than some articles published in high Impact Factor journals.

In our current research, we wanted to know what academics themselves think of the impact of different journals, were "impact" can mean several different things.  We surveyed agricultural and environmental economics who were members of at least one of the seven largest agricultural economics associations throughout the world.   We asked respondents to tell us which (of a set of 23 journals) they thought 1) would "most/least enhance your career progression, whether at your current institution or another at which you would like to work" and 2) "The journal whose papers you think have most/least impact beyond academia (i.e., on policy makers, business community, etc.).”  We compared the journal rankings based on these two measures of impact to each other and to the aforementioned Impact Factor based on citations data. 

We find:

“We find no significant correlation between the journal scores based on the two criteria, nor between them and the journals’ impact factors. These results suggest that impact beyond academia is poorly aligned with career incentives and that citation measures reflect poorly, if at all, peers’ esteem of journals. ”

My favorite part of the paper are a set of graphs Dan put together plotting the various measures of impact against each other.  Here's one showing a journal's Impact Factor vs. respondent's perception of the career impact of publishing in the journal.

Woman A Leading Authority On What Shouldn’t Be In Poor People’s Grocery Carts

Yes, it's from the Onion.  But, as most stories from the Onion, they're funny because they hold a glimmer of truth.

“NORTHAMPTON, MA—With her remarkable ability to determine exactly how others should be allocating their limited resources for food, local woman Carol Gaither is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on what poor people should and should not have in their grocery carts, sources said Thursday.

As verified by multiple eyewitness reports from supermarkets across the Northampton area, the real estate agent and mother of three is capable of scanning the contents of any low-income person’s basket and rapidly identifying those items which people like that don’t need to be buying, based on the products’ nutrition and cost. Additionally, Gaither, 48, is widely regarded as a leading expert in determining which groceries they would purchase instead if they had any common sense or restraint.”

Do farm subsidies prop up rural communities?

A new paper in the journal Applied Economic Perspectives & Policy by Jeremy Weber, Conor Wall, Jason Brown, and Tom Hertz asks whether farm subsidies boost the rural economy.  The abstract:

“Policy makers in the United States often justify agricultural subsidies by stressing that agriculture is the engine of the rural economy. We use the increase in crop prices in the late 2000s to estimate the marginal effect of increased agricultural revenues on local economies in the U.S. Heartland. We find that $1 more in crop revenue generated 64¢ in personal income, with most going to farm proprietors and workers (59%) or nonfarmers who own farm assets (36%). The evidence suggests a weak link between revenues and nonfarm income or employment, or on population. Cuts to agricultural subsidies are therefore likely to have little effect on the broader rural economy in regions like the Heartland.”

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