Constructing an ‘efficient frontier’ of accounting journal quality

This paper reports the construction of an ‘efficient frontier’ of the perceived quality attributes of academic accounting journals. The analysis is based on perception data from two web-based surveys of Australasian and British academics.The research reported here contributes to the existing literature by augmenting the commonly supported single dimension of quality with an additional measure indicating the variation of perceptions of journal quality. The result of combining these factors is depicted diagrammatically in a manner that reflects the risk and return trade-off as conceptualised in the capital market model of an efficient frontier of investment opportunities. This conceptualisation of a ‘market’ for accounting research provides a context in which to highlight the complex issues facing academics in their roles as editors, researchers and authors.The analysis indicates that the perceptions of the so-called ‘elite’ US accounting journals have become unsettled particularly in Australasia, showing high levels of variability in perceived quality, while other traditionally highly ranked journals (ABR, AOS, CAR) have a more ‘efficient’ combination of high-quality ranking and lower dispersion of perceptions. The implications of these results for accounting academics in the context of what is often seen as a market for accounting research are discussed.     

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.     

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.     

Aggregating Incomplete Lists of Journal Rankings: An Application to Academic Accounting Journals*

We introduce a branch‐and‐cut algorithm to aggregate published journal rankings based on subsets of the accounting literature in order to create a consensus ranking. The aggregate ranking allows specialist and regional journals, which may only be ranked in a limited number of studies, to be placed with respect to each other and with respect to the generalist journals that are usually included in ranking studies. The approach we develop is a significant advance over ad hoc approaches to aggregating journal rankings that have appeared in the literature and may provide a theoretically sound and replicable basis for further exploration of the concept of journal quality and the stability of journal rankings over time and ranking methods.     

The impact of citations in International Finance

The globalization of business and economic activities is expected to increase readership and citation performance for articles with an international focus. This study measures the impact of such articles on rankings and citation scores of thirty-one academic journals in accounting, economics and finance. Sample statistics show that these journals increased their proportion of global articles from a median of 15% in 2001 to a median of 25% in 2008. Two regression models (logistic and OLS) support the increasing role of international articles on journal performance. Both approaches show that improvements in ranking and citation scores were positively affected by global coverage, especially in economics. The results also highlight that two research topics dominate the field of global finance: International Corporate Governance and International Banking.     

Publication outlets for healthcare financial research: A study of journal quality perceptions

Publications in high quality journals often serve to indicate research productivity. However, many top‐rated journals infrequently publish cross‐disciplinary topics such as healthcare financial management (HFM). So, academic administrators and HFM researchers find it challenging to evaluate the quality of the work. Journals open to publishing HFM articles are distributed across multiple disciplines. Each field has its own journal rankings typically focused on their primary subject area. Starting with prior literature, we form a cross‐disciplinary journal list and solicit preliminary input from editors, associated editors, reviewers, and authors. We then solicit confirmatory ranking input from independent researchers in a holdout sample.     

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.     

The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in the US: The process for anointing academic elites

This paper reports the results of a study of the most prolific publishers in the four recognized most prestigious journals in accounting for the period 1963 through 1999. The focus is on learning whether the widespread perception that behavioral accounting research (BAR) has diminished in significance as a prominent paradigm in the US accounting academy has any validity and to identify whether a new generation of US BAR researchers is emerging to join the academic elite. Based on the characteristics of persons who have appeared as authors five or more times during the study period, it seems that BAR is in recession in shaping the US academic agenda in accounting. The power of successful individuals to shape the academic agenda as evidenced by service on editorial boards of prominent journals is dominated by those individuals who are graduates of a set of elite schools utilizing a neoclassical economics based research paradigm. The power of this group seems to be growing in the US. In spite of the interest in BAR among accounting doctoral students and faculty, it is not a pursuit that now leads to academic status, which, in turn, diminishes its potential contribution towards the shaping of the accounting academic agenda.     

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 journals and the ABS quality ratings

This study aims to look behind the quality ratings for accounting journals, listed in the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide (Kelly, Morris, Rowlinson and Harvey, 2009). Significant variations exist in the perceptions of journal quality across the six UK business schools that contribute ratings to the ABS guide, with the most optimistic perceptions tending to come from those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with quality scores for critical and interpretive research, as reported in Lowe and Locke's (2005) article in Accounting, Organizations and Society (30:1, 81–98). Pessimistic perceptions are more likely to exist in those schools whose ratings are more highly correlated with Lowe & Locke's scores for functional and capital markets research paradigms. There are also notable variations in journal ratings across time. Given that perceptions vary so much across schools, paradigms and time, how much credence can be given to any single rating system for journal quality? This study concludes that if the ABS guide is to be used by university decision-makers or heads of school then the ABS ratings for any given year need to be treated with extreme caution and with an appropriate recognition of their intrinsic limitations.     

The Impact of Accounting Education Research

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study into the nature and patterns of usage of accounting education research. The study adopts the most accessible metric, Google Advanced Scholar citations, to analyse the impact of research published in the six principal English-language accounting education journals. The analysis reveals a global readership for these journals but evidence of relatively low citation levels. However, papers tended to be cited more than expected in cross-disciplinary education journals, discipline-specific education journals, and non-education journals. Guidance is offered to authors seeking to maximise the impact of their research, and issues of concern are identified for editors and publishers. This is the first paper to look beyond content at the usefulness of research in accounting education as indicated by citations. In doing so, it contributes to the current debate on the quality of this research, and of research in accounting and finance in general.     

The Impact of Journal Rankings on Australasian Accounting Education Scholarship – A Personal View

Abstract

The higher education environment in which academics currently find themselves is one characterised by corporatisation and commodification. The pursuit of scholarly academic research is increasingly plagued by quantification, ranking pursuits, and what might be referred to as a ‘publication’ maximisation culture. This paper provides reflective insight into the impact felt of journal rankings on Australasian accounting education research. The paper challenges the short-termism and narrow focus currently adopted by many business faculty executives, who continue to use journal rankings as the sole measure of academic performance. The paper argues that this results in incentive schemes not too dissimilar to that recently found within the financial industry. The paper concludes that such a narrow approach to measurement should be abandoned in order to encourage creativity and innovation in business research that assists in solving business problems today and well into the future.     

Ranking North American accounting scholars publishing accounting education papers: 1966–2011

This paper ranks accounting’s education authors who teach at institutions located in the United States and Canada. During the 46-year period from 1966 through 2011 that we examined, 13 journals published accounting education papers; the publication period for each journal varies. The data indicate that only 31.4% of accounting’s 4855 doctoral faculty who teach at schools in North America have one or more publications in these 13 journals. For those doctorates still teaching, the research provides rankings of authors by doctoral year and for four periods: 2002–2011 (most recent 10 years), 1992–2001 (next 10-year period), 1966–1991 (last 26 years), and for the entire 46-year period. To acknowledge the contributions of retired and deceased authors, the research lists those authors who would have been included on the overall list had they still been actively teaching. While Urbancic (2009) and Brigham Young University (BYU) provide rankings of authors in accounting education, these rankings are limited in the scope of the journals included – Urbancic includes only six accounting education journals, while BYU includes only Issues in Accounting Education. We found that Urbancic’s (BYU’s) 10-year (20-year) data had a Spearman’s rho of −0.84 (0.39) with our rankings. We believe that data presented herein provides a more comprehensive ranking of accounting’s authors in the area of education.     

WHY DO UK ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE ACADEMICS NOT PUBLISH IN TOP US JOURNALS?

In peer reviews of the quality of academic accounting and finance journals, US journals are consistently perceived to be the most prestigious. UK accounting and finance academics share these perceptions, and yet very few of them ever publish in top US journals. A survey of UK accounting and finance academics was undertaken in an attempt to ascertain why this is so. The respondents perceive that the preference of top US journals for a US focus to published articles, reinforced by a strong element of gatekeeping and the need to be able to network with the US academic community, provide major barriers to entry. As a result, there is a strong belief that efforts to publish in top US journals will be unsuccessful and, therefore, publishing in the UK is seen to be easier.     

Risk Management and Insurance-Related Journals: A Survey of Risk and Insurance Academics

This research provides an assessment of the utility and quality of risk management and insurance (RMI)-related journals using professorial expert opinion. Although Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-produced citation counts and article impact factors are widely available and commonly used methods of journal comparison, they are limited to very few generally premier journals in any field, including RMI, leaving stakeholders with substantial gaps when benchmarking journal factors. We bridge this gap by comparing RMI faculty opinion of quality to SSCI assessments for 13 journals with results indicating general consistency across these measures. The expert opinion approach is extended to assess quality across a sample of 30 RMI-related publications, along with assigning journal categories delineated based on reported academic utility, contributing to RMI boundary definitions. Posthoc analysis indicates only modest influences for some individual, institutional, and journal-related factors on professorial perceptions, evidence that expert opinions are reliable measures of RMI journal utility and quality. Additionally, only modest differences are found in journal quality assessments by academics relative to the teaching versus research institutional mission of their employers, as well as across perceived individual teaching versus research role expectations. Thus, the expert opinion approach to evaluating utility and quality, coupled with regression and subsample analysis, aids RMI academics and other stakeholders in journal assessment and boundary definition issues. These contributions to the advancement of journal assessment methodologies in general may also prove useful across academic disciplines.     

Accounting research in the Asia–Pacific region: an update

We provide an updated study of accounting research in the Asia–Pacific region using the publication records of six premier accounting journals (top-6) from 1991 to 2010, and augment the findings with the broader range of publications from an additional twenty accounting journals during the same period. Overall, the higher education institutions (HEIs) in the region produced 7.7 and 11.1 % of the total weighted number of articles (wt-articles) in the top-6 and 20 accounting journals. Interestingly, HEIs in the region exhibit a trend toward an increase in the yearly wt-articles and relative percentage of the total. The general performance of the accounting programs in the region is persistent during 1991–2010. The Asia–Pacific accounting programs are particularly successful in placing publications in journals such as Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting. The accounting research productivity, however, is dominated by select institutions in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore. Several institutions in these four countries/areas maintain a consistently high ranking. In terms of top-6 accounting journal publications, the top five institutions are the University of New South Wales, Nanyang Technological University, the University of Melbourne, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The percentage share of the research output among the top five institutions is high, suggesting that a high hurdle is set for up-and-coming institutions to move up the rankings.     

Productivity in “Top‐Ten” Academic Accounting Journals by Researchers at Canadian Universities*

We examine the research productivity of academic accountants at Canadian universities for the 11‐year period 1990‐2000. Our analysis is based on the “top‐ten” ranked refereed journals in accounting, auditing, and taxation, as documented by Brown and Huefner (1994). We first provide an overview of the importance of publishing in highly ranked accounting journals for individual academics, departments, and business faculties. We then provide details of the proportion of articles published in each of these journals by academics from Canadian universities; the type of research published in each journal (auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and taxation); and details of editorial board service. Our results indicate that even at the most productive Canadian university (in terms of “top‐ten” publications), faculty members publish (on average) approximately one article every seven years. Six Canadian universities have faculty members with, on average, more than one article in “top‐ten” journals every 10 years. We also provide results of analyses that rank each Canadian university, after controlling for the relative quality of each journal, using impact factors published by the Social Science Citation Index. In addition, statistics are provided with regard to the 15 most productive researchers, in terms of “top‐ten” publications, in the 11‐year period. Finally, in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, we examine the productivity of academic accountants at Canadian universities over the past 25 years by combining our results with those reported by Richardson and Williams (1990).     

Accounting Journal Rankings,Authorship Patterns and the Author Affiliation Index

We conduct an evaluation of 43 accounting journals using the author affiliation index (AAI). Our results suggest that the Australian Business Dean's Council (ABDC) ratings are consistent with the AAI‐based rankings. Nonetheless, there are a few highly (lowly) regarded accounting journals in terms of AAI receiving a relatively lower (higher) rating in the ABDC journal ranking list. The co‐authorship patterns suggest that top AAI and near‐top AAI journals actually see more co‐authorship from scholars in top programs and scholars in other programs (both ranked 21–100 and ‘others’).     

Faculty perceptions of journals: quality and publishing feasibility

Tenure-track faculty at AACSB-accredited colleges were surveyed regarding their perceptions of 152 journals. Response measures included perceptions of journal quality and the feasibility of publishing in each journal. Analyses of responses from 616 faculty document statistically significant differences in both quality and publishing feasibility across journals, scholarship areas, and degree-granting categories (doctoral versus nondoctoral). Significant interactions were also found to exist across these factors. Effect size estimates for variations in quality and feasibility across journals, scholarship areas, and the interaction of journals and scholarship areas suggest that the magnitudes of observed differences are nontrivial. Listings of the 20 highest quality journals for most individual scholarship areas were found to have little in common with an overall top-20 listing. Overall, these results suggest that area-specific journal ratings provide better information than a single overall ranking list.     

Benchmarks for evaluating the research productivity of accounting faculty

This study reports comprehensive data on both the quantity and quality of research productivity of 3878 accounting faculty who earned their accounting doctoral degrees from 1971 to 1993. Publications in 40 journals were used to measure faculty publication quantity. Journal ratings derived from a compilation of the rankings of five prior studies and co-authorship were used to measure publication quality. Choosing benchmarks for an individual faculty requires users of our data to determine four parameters: (1) what credit to give a faculty member for co-authored articles; (2) what level of journal quality is appropriate, e.g. presenting benchmarks for publications in the Best 4, Best 12, Best 22 and Best 40 journals; (3) choosing appropriate levels of performance, e.g. considering the publication record in the top 10%, top 20%, top 25%, top 33%, or top 50% of all faculty; and (4) deciding the emphasis to place on the number of years since the doctoral degree was earned. We believe that this is the first set of benchmarks that allows administrators to state, with some justification, a required number of articles for tenure or promotion. In addition, we discovered that the average number of authors per article is significantly correlated with time and growing at a pace of 0.017 authors per article per year.