Accounting History celebrated a milestone at the end of 2010 -its first 15 years as an international refereed journal. This paper examines and provides commentary on the articles that have appeared in the journal from 1996 to 2010 using a series of thematic landscapes depicting dominant research trends and trajectories. Addressed are issues connected with the emergence of new themes, methods and topics, and the relative decline of other areas of historical accounting research. The investigation of these landscapes also provided the opportunity to explore and advance ideas concerning some unanswered calls and prospects in mapping the future content and profile of Accounting History.

Purpose -The paper has a dual purpose, being to report on an interrogation of concepts and contexts of accountability used in the accounting literature and to illustrate the application of a qualitative data analysis software tool in this interrogation. Design/methodology/approach -A content analysis was undertaken of 114 journal articles related to accountability and published in highly ranked accounting journals from 2000 to 2007. Findings -Accountability is a concept used in a variety of contexts, particularly in connection with public accountabilities and accountability in the public sector, as well as within social contexts. The emphasis appears to be on accountability reporting in these settings, with less concern for the management perspective. The variety of contextual usage and categorisations of the term "accountability" indicate it has not become more precise over the period in question.Research limitations/implications -Since only 21 accounting journals are sampled, there is scope for investigating accountability concepts across a broader base of publication outlets. The findings suggest that greater effort should be devoted to developing frameworks of accountability, researching accountability in relatively under-explored contexts and settings, and considerable scope for researchers to more frequently utilise computer-assisted qualitative data analysis in content analysis studies concerning accounting and accountability. Originality/value -While there is anecdotal evidence of the elusive nature of accountability, this paper provides a window on conceptions of accountability employed by accounting scholars and the contexts in which accountability is discussed and researched. Further, the use of the Leximancer software tool in qualitative content analysis is demonstrated, noting that the accounting literature is currently devoid of examples of applications of this software.

Elements of the history of research publications on accounting’s past are examined through an analysis of citations appearing in 546 articles published from 1996 to 2008 in the three specialized, English language, accounting history journals. The purpose was to enlighten understandings of this corpus of literature, particularly through the exploration of the significance, interrelationships and comparative dimensions of this journal network and its scholarly community. There was an observable insularity in citation patterns within the specialist journals, and yet a degree of heterogeneity across these journals. The analysis also defined a group of core, commonly cited articles in these journals, although all such articles were drawn from generalist accounting journals, with the extent of citations to the broader business, economic and management history literatures illustrating minimal engagement with these related disciplines. The findings suggest that while accounting history, as a discipline, can foster excellence in research, there is considerable scope for addressing identified deficiencies in the literature and for expanding the research community to enliven the discipline.

Within the context of debate about the state of accounting education in general, introductory accounting subjects have been the target of considerable criticism, particularly in terms of narrow content, technical focus, use of transmissive models of teaching, and inattention to the development of students' generic skills. This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study of these issues in introductory accounting which involved the review of subject outlines and prescribed textbooks, and the conduct of a cross-sectional survey of the introductory accounting teaching coordinators in Australian universities (n = 21). The primary aims of the study were to establish and apply benchmarks in evaluating existing curricula with respect to subject orientation, learning objectives, topics, teaching delivery, learning strategies, and assessment. The results of the study suggest that traditional approaches to subject content and delivery continue to dominate, with limited indicators of innovations to enhance the diversity and quality of learning experiences and learning outcomes.Accounting education, introductory accounting, educational benchmarking, pedagogy,

Carnegie and Napier (1996, p.7) call for studies in accounting history which expand or reinterpret the archive, contending that the results can provide "insight into accounting's present and future through its past". In this article the census is revealed as specifically grounded within the domain of accounting, and is presented as an artefact arising from a range of necessities to account and to satisfy obligations to be accountable. The prior, limited use made of census data in accounting history studies is detailed, and a number of historical censuses examined from an accounting perspective. Particularly emphasized and exemplified are early colonial Australian censuses and musters. A discussion of the potential for using this largely unmined archive in informing a range of studies of accounting's past, based on a variety of historiographical approaches, is developed and offered as a means for extending and supplementing existing research agendas in accounting history.