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 ®ve 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 ®rst set of benchmarks that allows administrators to state, with some justi®cation, a required number of articles for tenure or promotion. In addition, we discovered that the average number of authors per article is signi®cantly correlated with time and growing at a pace of 0.017 authors per article per year. #

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Incidents of research misconduct, especially falsification, in the hard sciences and medicine have been widely reported. Motives for misconduct include professional advancement and personal recognition. Accounting academics are under the same tenure, promotion and recognition pressures as other academics; and, without the life-and-death issues of medical research, rationalizing misconduct in accounting research seems much easier. It is reasonable to assume that dishonesty has occurred, even if little evidence exists about its prevalence. Further, accounting research can influence tax policy and market conditions, affecting people's lives. This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to survey accounting researchers directly as to their ethical practices; it uses the randomized response technique of addressing sensitive questions. To maximize its relevance to the most respected accounting research, this questionnaire was sent only to the most prolific researchers at U.S. colleges and universitiesthose who have published in the 'top thirty' accounting journals. The results indicate that serious misconduct has occurred among these established accounting researchers. The estimated percentage of seriously tainted articles in the top thirty accounting journals, based on self-reporting, is about 4 per cent, while the respondents on average believe that about 21 per cent of the literature is tainted. Faculty who were tenured more recently provide higher estimates of the falsification rate, and attribute more of the cause to external factors like tenure pressure. The article concludes by discussing implications and offering policy recommendations.

With the advent of computerized data searches, the number of accounting programs that use citation analysis to measure faculty members’ research productivity has increased—often believing that this methodology offers relevant or reliable data for tenure, promotion, teaching load, and merit pay decisions. But such “objective” bases often ignore such factors as which journals to count, the effect of co-authorships, and article quality. Reliance on such citations can also cause “uneven playing fields” within the accounting discipline as well as among accounting and other areas or departments within schools of business. After reviewing the relevant literature, we present the results of a survey asking accomplished authors about the factors that make them more or less likely to cite an article. Since the process of counting citations focuses on quantity issues (as all citations “count” equally regardless of the citation’s importance to the research article and the reasons for making the citation), we examine some quality issues that lead to authors citing others’ research findings. The survey results indicate that, while citations often are based on the quality of the cited work, other factors less indicative of quality, such as authorship by a friend or colleague and publication in a U.S. journal, help to determine which relevant works are cited or not cited. We also suggest other measures to assess research quality to supplement or replace citation counts.

In recent years, females are comprising a larger portion of faculty members entering the academic marketing profession than in the past. This academic trend is similar to the trend in the business sector, where a previously male-dominated workforce is being replaced by one of more equity. This study provides demographic information on rank, experience, doctoral training, and representation on prestigious scholarly marketing journals' editorial review boards of the men and women who currently comprise the marketing professorate. Although more than one-third of the marketing doctorates in the 1990s have been granted to women, they comprise less than 20% of the total U.S. marketing faculties.