Where do agricultural economists publish and how do they assess journal quality? A survey in Austria, Germany and Switzerland

When selecting journals as publication outlets, researchers face trade-offs between journals' quality, reputation, audience and publication speed. Beyond citation-based metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), survey-based journal rankings can serve as an important tool to guide authors' decisions about where to submit manuscripts for publication. This article presents the results from a 2023 survey of 304 agricultural economists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, who evaluated 160 journals by scientific quality, review quality and reputation. The survey is an update of the 2009 GEWISOLA/ÖGA journal ranking (Dabbert et al., 2009; Herrmann et al., 2011). We compute again a quality index (QI), based on researchers' perceptions of scientific and review quality, but apply it to the current situation of a strongly growing and proliferated journal market. As agricultural economists are increasingly involved in multi- and interdisciplinary research, our use of a publication-citation indicator leads to a much broader set of journals. Results indicate a higher average QI across journals than in the 2009 journal ranking, a similar group of leading journals, and reputation as a key driver of journal choice. We find and discuss discrepancies between the QI and JIF and inconsistencies between publication patterns and perceived quality. For the 66 journals appearing in both rankings, the average QI increased substantially while the QIs are highly correlated between the two surveys. In a robustness check, we use mean-centered scores to compute an adjusted QI, which does not substantially alter the ordering of journals.