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

Abstract

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).

Collaboration networks in accounting research

“…The pattern of internationalization in accounting research is evident in the nationality leading institutions. Our findings about the dominating presence of American accounting researchers, the thin representation of UK and Canadian researchers in leading accounting journals and also on the relatively higher internationalization of published research in AOS corroborate previous findings of Mathieu and McConomy (2003) and Brown et al (2007). We should note, however, that our results on intellectual partnership are sensitive to the topical focus and the theoretical framework of the published research that we investigate: e.g.…”

“…The internationalization of accounting research was also the topic of Carmona, Gutiérrez, & Camara, (1999), who, in a European context, examined a sample of thirteen international journals from 1992 to 1997. They found that European research in accounting was dominated by authors who were affiliated with institutions in the UK and also that non-English written accounting research exhibits limited mobility, in the sense that it rarely transcends its national barriers in order to reach a wider European audience; language barriers were also documented in Canada, where French-language universities had a smaller amount of publications in leading accounting journals, compared to their English language counterparts in the same country (Mathieu and McConomy, 2003); language and nationality barriers in the mobility of European accounting research was subsequently confirmed by Raffournier and Schatt (2010). Despite evidence that the European accounting literature was dominated by authors from the UK, Beattie and Goodacre (2003) demonstrated that, in 1998 and 1999, approximately 25 percent of the (rapidly growing) scholarly output by UK academics in accounting was coauthored with writers outside the UK academic community, thus indicating some openness of this community to collaborations with authors from other countries or with practitioners; the relative openness of UK accounting academia was also confirmed by Jones and Roberts (2005) who discovered that, for 1996-2000 period, more than half of the articles that were published in UK-based accounting journals were (co)written by authors from overseas.…”

Ethics Education and the Role of the Symbolic Market

“…The period of interest was 1990 until the present, as the status of the five journals in question has remained relatively stable over this time (Mathieu and McConomy, 2003). The ultimate list comprised 65 individuals, many of whom are now working in élite institutions (i.e., Chicago, Rochester, etc.)…”

The origins of research and patterns of authorship in theInternational Journal of Production Research

“…Institutional rankings are determined by the number of articles published by authors affiliated with the institution. For example, institutions have been ranked using this approach in a variety of academic disciplines such as Supply Chain Management (Maloni, Carter, and Kaufmann 2012), Transportation and Logistics (Carter et al 2005), Accounting (Chan, Chen, and Cheng 2005;Mathieu and McConomy 2003), Economics (Conroy et al 1995;Coupe 2003;Jin and Hong 2008;Scott and Mitias 1996), Finance (Heck, Cooley, and Hubbard 1986;Heck 2007;Lasser and Rydqvist 2006;Sousa and Vieira 2011), Information Systems (Clark and Warren 2006;Clark et al 2011), Behaviour Analysis (Shabani et al 2004), Biology (Grant et al 2007), Criminal Justice (Fabianic 2002;Sorensen and Pilgrim 2002;Steiner and Schwartz 2006), Psychology (Feingold 1989;Mahoney et al 2010), Real Estate (Chan et al 2008;Turnbull 2000, 2002;Jin and Yu 2011;Urbancic 2007), Rehabilitation Counselling (West, Armstrong, and Ryan 2005), Science Education (Barrow, Settlage, and Germann 2008), and Special Education (Miller and Maddux 1991). Additionally, in the area of Finance, Heck (2007) and Heck, Cooley and Hubbard (1986) considered the ranking of institutions based on the affiliation of authors as well as where the researchers received their Ph.D. training.…”