The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension

About The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension

The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension: Competence for Rural Innovation and Transformation

The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension (JAEE) is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis that examines how farmers, rural communities, advisors, educators and policy makers learn, communicate and innovate. Its full working subtitle, Competence for Rural Innovation and Transformation, states the journal's centre of gravity precisely. This is not a journal of agronomy, crop science or animal production as such. It is a journal about the human and institutional processes that surround agricultural production: extension and advisory services, agricultural education and training, innovation systems, communication, competence development and the policies that organise all of them. A manuscript about a new farming technique belongs here only when the real subject is how people learn about it, evaluate it, adapt it, teach it or organise support around it.

The directory record for this journal gives the print ISSN 1389-224X and the online ISSN 1750-8622, with Taylor & Francis in the United Kingdom as publisher, and those identifiers match the journal's listings in Scopus-derived sources and on the publisher platform. Authors should use that ISSN pair to distinguish JAEE from two close namesakes that cause regular confusion. The Journal of Agricultural Education is a separate, United States-based title concerned largely with school and university agricultural education, and the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education is the journal of an international association in the same broad field. All three publish worthwhile work, but they have different editors, different publishers and different expectations. Citing one while meaning another is a avoidable error, and the ISSN check takes less than a minute.

The publisher describes the journal's purpose as informing researchers, policy makers and practitioners of agricultural education and extension about research conducted in the field, with a focus on contributions to theory and on improvements in policies, strategies, methods and practices. That three-part audience, researcher, policy maker and practitioner, shapes what a successful JAEE article looks like. It must be scholarly enough for the research community, clear enough about implications for a ministry or an advisory organisation, and grounded enough that someone who trains farmers or extension staff can see what would change on Monday morning. Papers that speak to only one of those audiences, in only one local setting, with no transferable lesson, are the papers the journal's editors warn against in their own guidance.

Quick Facts

Two cautions belong with any quick-facts table. First, metrics move. The impact and ranking figures attached to this journal in third-party listings differ between listing years because each listing is a snapshot, so this profile reports the journal's quartile position and the order of magnitude of its rank rather than presenting one year's number as permanent. Second, the publisher's own journal page is the only authoritative source for submission rules, article types and editorial policy. Everything in this profile should be read as a guide that points back to that page.

What the Journal Is For: Learning, Advice and Innovation in Agriculture

Extension is an old idea with a changing job. The classical model imagined knowledge flowing in one direction, from research stations through extension agents to farmers who would adopt what they were given. That linear model has been criticised for decades, including in this journal's own pages, where special issues on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems argued for a systems view: farmers, advisors, researchers, firms, non-governmental organisations and public agencies all produce knowledge, and innovation emerges from their interaction rather than from a single pipeline. JAEE is one of the main international outlets where that systems view has been developed, tested and argued about. Readers coming to the journal for the first time will find innovation systems, learning networks and multi-stakeholder processes treated not as fashionable vocabulary but as working frameworks with a long publication history behind them.

The publisher's scope statement describes a field in motion. Agricultural education and extension, it notes, face profound change, and attention is shifting towards communication, competence development and performance improvement across many fields and audiences, studied from multidisciplinary and systemic perspectives. The journal accordingly welcomes original research and new evidence on learning, communication, innovation, change and competence development in relation to agricultural education and extension. That sentence does a great deal of work. It tells authors that a purely technical trial is out of place, that a study of communication or learning must still be about agriculture, and that the journal values work which crosses disciplinary lines, for example joining adult education with rural sociology, or innovation studies with public administration.

The topic list the journal has used to describe its territory is long, and it is worth reading as a set of doors rather than as decoration. It includes communication for development; competence management and development; corporate social responsibility and human resource development; the design and implementation of competence-based education; environmental and natural resource management; entrepreneurship and learning; facilitating multiple-stakeholder processes; health and society; innovation of agricultural-technical education; innovation systems and learning; integrated rural development; interdisciplinary and social learning; learning, conflict and decision making; poverty reduction; performance improvement; and sustainable agricultural production. Recent additions in the same spirit include advisory services and intermediaries, agricultural entrepreneurship, digital extension and education, and agricultural human capital. A prospective author can use the list diagnostically: if a manuscript fits none of these doors even loosely, it is probably meant for another journal; if it fits one door clearly, the introduction should say so and should show how the paper advances the conversation that door represents.

Scope in Practice: What Fits and What Does Not

The publisher is unusually explicit about the boundary of the journal, and authors ignore that guidance at their cost. In agricultural education, the journal accepts papers on the education and training of farmers, farm workers, future farmers, agricultural advisors and extension staff, agricultural professionals and change agents. It then adds a sharp condition: in agricultural education studies, agriculture must be the focus and not only the context. A study of teaching techniques in a faculty of agricultural sciences is, by the journal's own example, not specific enough if it pays no attention to what is distinctive about teaching agricultural subjects. The same discipline applies on the extension side. Papers on advisory and extension practices, policies and systems, on intermediaries in agricultural innovation, on multi-stakeholder processes and on agricultural innovation systems are central. By contrast, the journal states that studies focused on agricultural technology adoption, or on the evaluation of education and training programmes, with no strong connection to or implications for extension theory fall outside its scope. An adoption study can therefore be rescued, but only by doing the theoretical work: showing what the case reveals about advice, learning, trust, networks or competence, rather than reporting adoption rates alone.

Three further requirements run through the publisher's guidance and should be treated as conditions of entry. Submissions must make a significant contribution to theory in the context of agricultural education and extension. They must use state-of-the-art methods, qualitative, quantitative or mixed, executed to a high standard. And they must contribute to the global literature and carry practical and policy implications that go beyond one country or one case study, demonstrating relevance to the wider community. None of that forbids a single-country study; most of the journal's content is built from particular places. It does require the author to lift the case into a conversation that a reader in another continent can use, by comparing with published findings, by testing or extending a framework, or by drawing implications that travel. Authors are also strongly encouraged by the publisher to read recent work in the journal and to position their manuscript within its lines of work and theoretical debates. A literature review that could have been written without opening JAEE is a visible weakness at screening.

Article Types and Editorial Process

The journal accepts four kinds of manuscript. Research articles present original empirical research using appropriate methods and data. Review articles summarise and advance the state of the art in a way that furthers theory and offers new thinking, which means a review must argue something, not merely count papers. Policy papers, including policy reviews, address current topics and themes in agricultural education and extension, and suit authors analysing a reform of an advisory system, a national extension policy or a training strategy. Commentary articles respond to articles already published in JAEE, are written from a contrasting position and contribute to debate on the journal's core topics. Book reviews are not accepted, and authors holding a review manuscript should look elsewhere rather than submitting and hoping for an exception.

Peer review is described by the publisher in concrete terms. All articles undergo rigorous review, beginning with screening by the editorial committee; many submissions are rejected at that initial stage, given the volume received. Papers that pass screening go to double-blind refereeing by at least two referees active in the academic community, and editors may invite additional reviewers in a first or second round, in which case earlier comments are shared with the new reviewers. Editorials are handled differently: they do not go through external peer review but are reviewed by the journal's editorial team. The publisher also states conflict-of-interest safeguards for editors: editors take no part in decisions on papers they have written themselves, papers by family members or colleagues at the same institution, papers by scholars with whom they have recently collaborated or co-authored within the last five years, or papers relating to products or services in which they have an interest. Such papers follow the journal's usual procedures with review handled independently of the editor concerned.

That process has practical implications for how a manuscript should be prepared. Because review is double-anonymised, the submitted file must not identify its authors, in the text, the acknowledgements, the file properties or self-citations phrased so as to reveal identity. Because screening is real, the title, the structured abstract and the first two pages carry disproportionate weight: they must state the theoretical contribution, the method and the wider implication plainly, before the detail begins. And because published authors may be invited to review for the journal in their area, submitting to JAEE is also, in a small way, joining its referee community, which is one more reason to write the kind of paper one would be glad to receive as a reviewer.

Indexing, Metrics and Reputation

JAEE is covered by Scopus, and SCImago's journal record, built on Scopus data, places it across Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous), Education, and Geography, Planning and Development. That spread of categories is informative in itself: the journal sits where agricultural sciences meet education and rural development, which is exactly where its scope statement puts it. In the SCImago-derived listings consulted for this profile, the journal's best quartile is the first quartile, its SJR in the most recent listing is around 0.6 to 0.7, and its h-index in the underlying journal record is in the high fifties in the directory data held for this site, with third-party snapshots from other years giving lower cumulative figures as expected for a growing total. The publisher platform also carries the journal's Journal Citation Reports position for readers who have access to that service.

The right way to use such numbers is modestly. A first-quartile position in its strongest Scopus category tells a doctoral student or a tenure committee that the journal is a recognised, selective outlet in its field. It does not tell a reader whether a particular article is sound, and it does not make the journal the right home for a paper whose topic sits at the edge of the scope. Editors screen for fit before quality, in the sense that an excellent paper on the wrong subject will still be declined. Authors choosing between JAEE and a more technical agricultural journal should decide by audience: choose JAEE when the contribution is about learning, advice, competence or innovation processes, and the readers who must see it are the scholars and policy actors who follow those debates.

Reading the Journal Well

For readers rather than authors, JAEE rewards thematic reading. Its special issues and editorial essays periodically take stock of the field, as when editors used an issue to argue that extension and education should address farmers and farm workers as whole people, including the social, economic, financial, human-resource and health dimensions of farming life, and to welcome work on how education and extension systems handle those wider needs. Editorials of that kind are a reliable guide to what the editors hope to receive next, and a new reader can reconstruct the field's movement by reading a run of them: from technology transfer, to innovation systems, to competence and learning networks, to digital advisory services and the reorganisation of extension under climate and market pressure. The research articles then supply the evidence, from case studies of advisory organisations to evaluations of training designs and analyses of policy reform, against which the editorials' claims can be tested.

Practitioners will find the policy papers and the implications sections of research articles the fastest entry points, while researchers will want the theoretical framing and the methods. Because the journal insists that papers state implications beyond their own case, a reader in one country can legitimately mine a study from another for design ideas, provided the institutional differences are kept in view: an advisory model that works inside a well-funded public system may need substantial adaptation inside a privatised or project-funded system, and the journal's comparative and systems papers are often explicit about exactly those conditions.

Costs, Access and Author Services

JAEE is a Taylor & Francis journal operating on the publisher's standard model: articles are published on the Taylor & Francis Online platform, institutional and individual subscription routes provide access to the full run, and open-access publication is offered through the publisher's author services for authors whose funders or institutions require it. The specific open-access charge for this title at any given moment is set by the publisher and can change; it is not stated in the sources used for this profile, so it is described here as not publicly disclosed in those sources, and authors who need the figure for a grant application should take it directly from the journal's page on the publisher platform rather than from a third-party listing, several of which quote conflicting amounts. What can be said firmly is that submission itself follows the publisher's online system, that a structured abstract is required, and that the publisher's instructions for authors govern formatting, referencing and declarations.

Submission Checklist

• Confirm identity before submitting: Taylor & Francis, print ISSN 1389-224X, online ISSN 1750-8622, and not either of the similarly named agricultural education journals.
• Test the topic against the journal's own boundary: agriculture must be the focus, not merely the setting, and adoption or programme-evaluation studies must connect strongly to extension or education theory.
• State the theoretical contribution, the method and the implication beyond the single case in the title page material and the structured abstract.
• Read recent JAEE articles on the topic and position the manuscript explicitly within the journal's debates.
• Choose the correct article type: research article, review article, policy paper or commentary; do not submit a book review.
• Anonymise the manuscript thoroughly for double-blind review, including acknowledgements, self-citations and file metadata.
• Use current, rigorous methods and report them fully enough for two or more specialist referees to judge them.
• Follow the publisher's instructions for authors for structure, references, declarations and the structured abstract, and take any fee or open-access figure from the publisher page only.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the same journal as the Journal of Agricultural Education?

No. That is a separate title with a different publisher and a stronger focus on school and university agricultural education, mainly in the United States. The journal in this profile is the Taylor & Francis title with print ISSN 1389-224X and online ISSN 1750-8622, centred on extension, advisory services and rural innovation as well as agricultural education.

Will the journal consider a study of farmers adopting a new technology?

Only if the study does more than measure adoption. The publisher states that adoption studies without a strong connection to, or implications for, extension theory are outside the scope. Framing the work around advice, learning, networks, trust or competence, and engaging the journal's theoretical conversation, is what brings such a study inside the scope.

Does a single-country case study stand a chance?

Yes, provided it is written for a global readership. The publisher requires contributions to the global literature and implications beyond one country or case. A single case that tests a framework, contradicts an established claim or yields design lessons for other systems meets that test; a purely local report does not.

How is peer review organised?

By initial editorial screening, which declines many submissions, followed for suitable papers by double-blind refereeing by at least two referees, with additional reviewers possible in later rounds. Editors are excluded from decisions on papers where they have a personal, institutional, collaborative or financial connection, as described in the publisher's policy.

What kinds of papers does the journal refuse?

Book reviews are not accepted. Work in which agriculture is only a backdrop, purely technical production studies, and evaluations or adoption reports with no theoretical or wider policy payoff are also outside the stated scope.

Where do I find the current open-access charge and submission rules?

On the journal's own pages on the Taylor & Francis Online platform. Third-party listings quote differing figures from different years, so the publisher page is the only safe source for a figure that will be written into a budget or a submission.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher's journal page on Taylor & Francis Online, which supplies the journal's stated purpose, its scope and its explicit exclusions, its four article types, its structured-abstract requirement and the full description of its peer-review and editor-conflict arrangements summarised above; on SCImago and Scopus-derived listings, which supply the category placements, quartile position and rank figures, reported here as positions and orders of magnitude because they vary by listing year; and on the directory record for this site, which supplies the ISSN pair and publisher line that those external sources confirm. Named individual editors and a current open-access price are not given in this profile because they are not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted in a form that could be quoted reliably; both should be taken from the publisher page at the time of submission. No fact in this profile has been carried over from either of the similarly named journals, and the distinctions drawn between them rest on their different publishers and ISSNs.