Ranking accounting journals using dissertation citation analysis: A research note

Prior literature on accounting journal rankings has provided different journal lists depending on the type of examination (citations- vs. survey-based) and the choice of journals covered. A recent study by Bonner, Hesford, Van der Stede, and Young (2006) [Bonner, S., Hesford, A., Van der Stede, W. A., & Young, M. S. (2006). The most influential journals in academic accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 31(7), 663–685] documents disproportionately more citations in the financial accounting area, suggesting a financial accounting bias in the accounting literature. We use citations from accounting dissertations completed during 1999–2003 to provide a ranking of accounting journals. The database allows us to assess the research interests of new accounting scholars and the literature sources they draw from. Another innovation is our ranking of accounting journals based on specialty areas (auditing, financial, managerial, tax, systems, and other) and research methods (archival, experimental, modeling, survey, and other). To mitigate the financial accounting bias documented by Bonner et al. (2006), we derive a ranking metric by scaling (normalizing) the journal citations by the number of dissertations within each specialty area and research method. Overall, the top journals are, JAR, AOS, TAR, and JAE. We also provide evidence that top journal rankings do vary by specialty area as well as by research methods.     

Measuring the impact of accounting journals using Google Scholar and the g-index

The UK's proposed Research Excellence Framework promotes a move towards citation analysis for assessing research performance. However, for business disciplines, journal rankings are likely to remain an important aid in evaluating research quality. The accounting literature includes many journal rankings and citation studies, however there has been little coverage of recent advances in these areas. This study explores approaches to assessing the impact of accounting journals with a focus on quantitative measures as a complement to peer-review-based evaluation. New data sources and techniques for citation studies are reviewed, and the g-index is selected for further analysis. The g-index was developed by Professor Leo Egghe in 2006 as an improvement on the h-index. Like the h-index, the g-index represents a relationship between papers published and the level of citations they receive, but the g-index is more sensitive to highly cited paper. To apply the g-index to accounting journals, the study first combines eight published journals rankings to produce a list of 34 highly-regarded titles. Citation data are then gathered from Google Scholar and used to calculate g-index scores as the basis of a new ranking. Google Scholar is found to have broader coverage of accounting citations than Scopus or the Web of Science databases, but requires cleaning to remove duplicate entries. The use of the g-index for ranking journals is found to be a useful innovation in citation analysis, allowing a more robust assessment of the impact of journals.     

You Cannot Judge a Book by Its Cover: The Problems with Journal Rankings

Abstract

Journal rankings lists have impacted and are impacting accounting educators and accounting education researchers around the world. Nowhere is the impact positive. It ranges from slight constraints on academic freedom to admonition, censure, reduced research allowances, non-promotion, non-short-listing for jobs, increased teaching loads, and re-designation as a non-researcher, all because the chosen research specialism of someone who was vocationally motivated to become a teacher of accounting is, ironically, accounting education. University managers believe that these journal ranking lists show that accounting faculty publish top-quality research on accounting regulation, financial markets, business finance, auditing, international accounting, management accounting, taxation, accounting in society, and more, but not on what they do in their ‘day job’ – teaching accounting. These same managers also believe that the journal ranking lists indicate that accounting faculty do not publish top-quality research in accounting history and accounting systems. And they also believe that journal ranking lists show that accounting faculty write top-quality research in education, history, and systems, but only if they publish it in specialist journals that do not have the word ‘accounting’ in their title, or in mainstream journals that do. Tarring everyone with the same brush because of the journal in which they publish is inequitable. We would not allow it in other walks of life. It is time the discrimination ended.     

Accounting and Finance at forty: a retrospective evaluation

Accounting and Finance has evolved from a news bulletin to a full-grown refereed academic journal that has published papers written by authors from Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, Europe and Asia. The Journal published its 41^st volume in 2001 and that anniversary issue coincides with the beginning of the new millennium. As part of the celebration of this important milestone, this article reviews the Journal's evolution, the variety of papers published and the Journal's impact on accounting and finance research in the Asia Pacific region. Data for 394 papers published in the Journal by 570 authors are analysed. I find that the distribution of institutions and authors that have published in the Journal is highly skewed, with the top five (11) institutions accounting for 35 per cent (51 per cent) of the published papers in the Journal. Similarly, 8 per cent of the authors have published 26 per cent of the articles in the Journal. Analysis of the citation pattern indicates that Accounting and Finance does not have much impact on research published in the Asia Pacific region, with the Journal accounting for only 1.06 per cent of all citations in the selected Asia Pacific journals. Sub-period analysis indicates that not even the establishment of the editorial board in the latter half of the 1990s has helped improve the impact of the Journal on research published in the Asia Pacific region. However, compared with other Asia-Pacific journals, Accounting and Finance has the strongest impact on publications in the selected journals. The impact is even stronger in the latter half of the 1990s. Also, the impact of Accounting and Finance on the more recent journals in the Asia Pacific region is stronger than that of the other more established journals.     

Psychometric methods in accounting education: a review,some comments and implications for accounting education researchers

Psychometric instruments are widely used in accounting education research (Herring et al., Issues in Accounting Education, 4(1), 48–57, 1989; Benke and Street, Accounting Education: an international journal, 1(1), 33–45, 1992). Problems with the reliability of scores produced by such instruments have led to difficulties in interpreting the results of applied research (Schriesheim et al., Journal of Management, 19, 385–417, 1993). This paper has three aims. The first is to present a rationale for including information about the measurement properties of research instruments used in published accounting education research. Information regarding the reliability and validity of item scores is useful to readers, journal editors and reviewers - especially when the research topic addresses changes in educational policy and processes. Second, problems encountered with questionnairebased research are presented and current practice in accounting education is reviewed. Third, construct validation is discussed in respect of measurement validity and factor analytic methods. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving contemporary practice in accounting education research.     

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF JOURNALS USED IN FINANCE RESEARCH

The relative importance of various finance and related journals to research published in major finance journals is determined by noting the frequency that all other journals are cited in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking during the period 1980 to mid?1985. Journals are ranked on the basis of their actual number of citations, citations per article, and citations per 10,000 words published annually. Results give an objective criterion for evaluating the relative impact on the major finance literature of writing in alternative journals. The list of journals developed with the citations methodology differs markedly, on the whole, from the list ranked by Coe and Weinstock (1983) who simply surveyed department chairpersons. Journals that are common to both lists, however, are ranked very much alike, indicating that chairpersons may rank journals they think to include in a subjective list in a way that is consistent with the citations criterion.     

Using Google Scholar citations to rank accounting programs: a global perspective

We conduct an assessment on accounting program research performance based on Google Scholar citations for all articles from a set of 23 quality accounting journals during 1991–2010. Our work is a new approach in accounting by directly measuring the impact of the faculty research in accounting programs. We find that the top-5 accounting programs are the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University. These top programs produce a large number of high impact articles. In addition, using the mean citations from all articles in a journal, we find that the Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) is a top-5 journal, replacing Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR).     

Food for Thought on the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide

This paper discusses issues relating to the use of the Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide within UK business schools. It also looks at several specific issues raised by the Chair of the British Accounting Association/British Accounting and Finance Association regarding the ratings for top international journals, and for accounting education and accounting history journals. The increasing use of this guide by business school deans/heads as a tool for staffing and research resource allocation has significant implications both for individuals and specialist areas of research.     

Journal Influence on the Design of Finance Doctoral Education

This article surveys the influence of research journals on finance doctoral education. Influence is measured by citations from syllabi of finance seminars. A sample of 101 distinct syllabi submitted by 33 finance doctoral programs yields a list of 1,031 articles cited by at least two schools. These 1,031 articles generate 3,273 citations referencing 17 finance, economics, and accounting journals, where multiple citations from a single school are counted as a single citation. The most notable findings are the wide variety of seminar content across finance doctoral programs and the dominance of five finance journals in providing this diverse content.     

The Impact of Non-Serial Publications on Research in Accounting and Finance

This study examines the role of books and official Publications in accounting and finance research. From an analysis of thirteen leading journals for the year 1987–8 we report on the characteristics of such non-serial materials used by authors to support their research. We find that the accounting discipline in particular has become more open to influence from other disciplines. The individual perspectives of these thirteen journals can be partially revealed by their use of non-serial materials. Using cluster analysis we examine inter-journal variations in the disciplinary pattern of book citations and the distribution of citations to official bodies. Several relatively homogeneous groupings are identified.     

Analysis of Accounting Expert Systems Citations: An Alternative Accounting Classification Scheme

This paper compares and contrasts a paper by Shanker, Nilakanta, and Norris (1992) that quantitatively analyzes citations with Brown (1989). The analytical approach used by Shanker et al. is discussed in light of the background and limitations of the original study, the accounting classification scheme used for the analysis, and classification differences caused by either authors classifying their own articles or someone else classifying the articles based on abstracts. An alternative accounting classification scheme is presented that uses four dimensions to describe and organize the discipline of accounting: accounting tasks, domain, organization type, and service provider. In this context, a number of representative accounting expert systems are classified and discussed. Recommendations are suggested for further research.     

Accounting Research in Abacus,A&F,AAR, and AJM from 2008–2015: A Review and Research Agenda

This paper uses bibliographic mapping techniques to map the research conversation in four Pacific Basin accounting journals listed on the Social Sciences Citation Index (Abacus, Accounting and Finance, Australian Accounting Review, and the Australian Journal of Management). We identify the main research streams in these journals as Accounting Standards, Environmental Accounting, Earnings Management, Disclosure, Conservatism, Auditing, Impairment, Cost of Capital, and Corporate Governance. We critically review each research stream, identify emerging research trends, and suggest an agenda for future research on accounting in the Pacific Basin.     

A machine learning analysis of citation impact among selected Pacific Basin journals

This study uses a machine learning approach to identify and predict factors which influence citation impacts across five Pacific Basin journals: Abacus, Accounting & Finance, Australian Journal of Management, Australian Accounting Review and the Pacific Accounting Review from 2008 to 2018. The machine learning results indicate that citation impact is mostly influenced by: length of a journal article; the field of research (particularly environmental accounting), sample size; whether the sample is local or international; choice of research method (e.g., archival vs survey/interview); academic rank of the first author; institutional status of the first author; and number of authors of the article. The results may be useful for predicting future trends in citation impact as well as providing strategies for authors and editors to improve citation impact.     

Scholarly achievement and accounting journal editorial board membership

The importance of editorial boards to the peer review process makes it imperative that board members be selected on the basis of proven records of scholarly achievement as demonstrated by publications in peer-reviewed journals and subsequent citations to those publications. Although research in accounting has looked at the composition of editorial boards, the scholarly achievement of editorial board members has not been examined. The purpose of our study is to empirically investigate the scholarly achievement of editorial board members of selected accounting journals. We find that the top accounting journals may not be using the same criteria in selecting editorial board members. Further, the level of achievement of the editorial board members and their articles’ impact factors were often inconsistent with the perceived ranking of the journals in which they served. A discussion and implications of our results are also provided.     

UK Accountants' Perceptions of Research Journal Quality

The process of research quality assessment is now firmly established in UK universities. The quality of the journals in which academic papers are published is an important input to the assessment process. The relative quality of these journals is clearly difficult to establish in an objective manner. This paper contributes to the debate about relative quality by conducting a peer review. Eighty-eight UK accounting academics reported their degree of familiarity with, and perceptions of quality of, a total of 44 journals in the accounting and finance discipline. Accounting and Business Research and theBritish Accounting Review were the two most familiar academic journals. The most highly ranked journals were generally from the US.     

Accounting education literature review (1991–1997), part II: students,educational technology,assessment and faculty issues

This paper updates literature reviews by Rebele et al. (1991)and Rebele and Tiller (1986)by reviewing a subset of the accounting education literature published during the period 1991–1997. In a preceding paper (Part I), Rebele et al. (1998)reviewed accounting education articles related to two topics: curriculum and instructional approaches. In this paper (Part II), we review articles related to the topics of students, educational technology, assessment and faculty issues, published primarily in the following five journals: Journal of Accounting Education, Issues in Accounting Education, The Accounting Educators' Journal, Accounting Education: A Journal of Theory, Practice and Research and Accounting Perspectives. Recommendations for future research are offered at the end of each major section. An appendix identifies instructional cases and educational resources published in accounting education journals during the 1991–1997 period.     

Performance-based Incentives and the Behavior of Accounting Academics: Responding to Changes

Abstract

When laws change the rules of the game, it is important to observe the effects on the players' behavior. Some effects can be anticipated while others are difficult to enunciate before the law comes into force. In this paper we have analyzed articles authored by Spanish accounting academics between 1996 and 2005 to assess the impact of a change in the Spanish university regulation. Results indicate a switch from publishing professional papers to academic ones and also to change research methodologies in order to meet the new requirements. This was to be expected due to the explicit mention of the law in favor of academic journals. However, we have also detected a significant decrease in the publication of professional papers. These side-effects could have a negative impact on the transmission of knowledge from university to society putting the relationship between accounting research and professional practice in jeopardy.     

What's New in Finance?

This paper prepares a list of the 300 most cited articles published in the area of Finance during the period 2000–2006. The articles are ranked based on the ratio of the number of citations and the number of years since publication, as of August 2007. Citation data come from Google Scholar and cover all articles in 29 Finance journals and Finance articles in 21 Economics, six Accounting, and two Operations research journals. The paper also reports the number of highly cited articles by number of authors, journal, research area, and institution.     

Drivers of research impact: evidence from the top three finance journals

We study the characteristics of all published papers in the top three finance journals (JF, JFE and RFS), and how these paper characteristics affect the number of citations in Google Scholar and the Web of Science database. First, we find the characteristics in the universalist perspective remain constant while the characteristics in the constructivist and presentation perspectives increase over time. Second, some characteristics are significantly different between the high-impact and the low-impact papers. Third, paper quality, research method, journal placement and paper age are the most important drivers. Last, different drivers play different roles in different journals.     

Teaching ethics in accounting: a discussion of cross-cultural factors with a focus on Confucian and Western philosophy

There has been pressure from various business and professional accounting bodies to place greater emphasis on ethics education. This has been reflected in academic research and curriculum development. The purpose of this paper is to expand the debate on accounting ethics education to take into account the globalization of business, accounting and educational services and to draw attention to the importance of cross-cultural factors. To illustrate this the paper discusses the impact that Confucius has had on the ethical thinking of East and South East Asia. Where appropriate, comparisons are made with Western attitudes and secular philosophies. This focus has been chosen because of the current and future importance of the Asian area to global commerce, and the fact that an understanding of its ethical thinking and behaviour is not possible without an appreciation of Confucian thought.