THE WAEA -- WHICH NICHE IN THE PROFESSION?

144 July 1988

Western Journal of Agricultural Economics

Table 1. WAEA Membership, 1965-74 and 1980-86

Source: 1965-68 data from DeLoach (p. 22); subsequent years from selected WAEA minutes.
’Years of joint AAEA-WAEA meetings (also 1977 and 1979).

^b Four western Canadian provinces.

^c Not available, lost or unavailable minutes.

some repute. Fourteen of twenty-six articles in
the last volume carry lead authorships from
outside the region. (In answer to a possible
trivial pursuit question, if you are asked, “What
journal contained three articles from Florida,
two each from Arkansas, Georgia, and Wash-
ington State, and one each from VPI, Arizona,
New Mexico State, and Alberta?”—the correct
answer is the most recent, December 1986,
issue of the WJAE.)

As part of my review, I surveyed authors of
articles appearing in the May and December
1986 issues of the WJAE, asking specifically
about their reasons for selecting our journal,
whether the WJAE was their first choice se-
lection (i.e., had their WJAE submission been
preceded by a rejection from another journal).
I also asked for their plans about possible al-
ternatives had the article been rejected by our
journal. I was able to contact twenty-one of
twenty-six authors by telephone and believe
the survey response to be insightful and rele-
vant to how they, and others, view the HKΛ4E^,,s
niche among professional journals in agricul-
tural economics.

Of the twenty-six articles, eleven were au-
thored by individuals located in the United
States or Canadian West at the time of re-
search. The remaining articles were authored
at fourteen nonwestem institutions, plus an
international contribution from New Zealand.
Table 2 reveals the geographic distribution of
authors regarding the question about whether
the WJAE was their first choice submission or
not. Eleven respondents, including one whose
article had been rejected elsewhere, indicated
that the WJAE choice was made because of a
western regional identity or focus to their work.
Three articles were submissions of work pre-
viously presented in WAEA selected papers
sections.

Of the five articles previously submitted
elsewhere, four had been subjected to AJAE
reviews and one to ajournai of the American
Statistical Association. One was subsequently
sent to the WJAE on reviewer suggestion, one
was submitted because of a regional focus, and
a third because the topic was similar to one
previously published in the WJAE and of
known interest to the new editors. All of the
articles rejected by the AJAE but published in
the 1986 volume of the WJAE were by non-
West authors. Perhaps the important thing to
note here is not that five of twenty-one articles
had been rejected elsewhere but rather that
sixteen of twenty-one articles, including eight

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