The Department at the University of New England is presently planning a series of internal and external reviews of its performance. This note was prepared as part of the background material pertaining to one particular aspect of performance, namely professional publication. It is contributed to this Forum in the belief that the approach and results may be of interest to agricultural economists in other academic and research departments. Broadly, the approach taken was to quantify publication output and several hypothesised influential factors for the history of the Department, including the period when this recent aggregation consisted of both the Department of Agricultural Economics and the Department of Farm Management. The period reviewed is 1959-1977 and all data are expressed on an annual basis.