Ranking of Agricultural Economics Departments by Citations

Ranking of agricultural economics departments based upon the number of articles or article pages does not take into account the impact or usefulness of these journal articles or other works to the profession. In this paper, an alternative ranking scheme is employed which utilizes citations from a broad array of publications of a department's faculty. Rankings are developed for agricultural economics units at 1862 land grant universities, 1890land grant universities, independent U.S. universities, and Canadian universities, as well as an overall composite ranking and comparisons with economics departments. Key words: agricultural economics departments, citations, ranking. In the competitive academic world there is considerable interest in measures of the qual-ity of the faculties at various institutions for a given discipline. In economics and agricultural economics, the predominant ranking criterion for such comparisons has been the volume of pages or number of articles in one major jour-nal, such as the American Journal ofAgricul-tural Economics (AJAE) , or a small set of "top " journals. The recent paper by Simpson and Steele represents a page count approach for one journal, while papers by Opaluch and Just, and Holland and Redman represent a ranking scheme for a small set of journals. In a recent article in American Economic Review, Davis and Papanek proposed an alter-native standard for ranking departments or in-dividuals-the numbers of citations received in an extensive set of professional publica-tions. Citations measure the quality of an ag-ricultural economist's work, as reflected by the degree to which fellow agricultural econo-mists and other social scientists have found that work relevant in their own research. This paper reports the results of a study which builds upon the Davis-Papanek ap-Richard P. Beilock, Leo C. Polopolus, and Mario Correal are, respectively, an associate professor, a professor, and a former undergraduate student in the Food and Resource Economics De