The Development of Agency Thought: A Citation Analysis of the Literature

Abstract

With the advent of new bibliographic data sources and new analytical techniques, accounting historians may now trace the development of accounting thought with the aid of bibliometric analysis. The objective of this paper is to discuss a social science view of history, discuss essential bibliometric concepts, and provide an example of citation analysis applied to the literature of agency theory — to demonstrate its use in historical research.

Cite and seek: Exploring accounting history through citation analysis of the specialist accounting history journals, 1996 to 2008

“…Carmona (2006) suggests that citation analysis studies are difficult because of the paucity of accounting journals in citation indices and databases, despite the promise for such studies to "contribute to the stream of research that examines the structure and diffusion of accounting knowledge within academic journals" (p.245). General accounting research studies adopting citation analytical techniques include those assessing the impact or influence of major mainstream journals and journal articles (see Bricker, 1988Bricker, , 1989Brown, 1996;Brown & Gardner, 1985;Chan & Liano, 2008;Chan, Chan, Seow and Tam, 2009;Wakefield, 2008) and of books and nonserial materials (Beattie & Ryan, 1991), together with topic-specific works such as literature on the development of behavioural accounting research (Hofstedt, 1976), agency thought, or accounting education (see Gamble, O'Doherty and Hyman, 1987;Gamble, Otto and Hyman, 1995).…”

Theoretical studies of the historical development of the accounting discipline: A review and evidence

“…In accounting, document co-citation analysis has been used to reveal the structure of individual research areas (Gamble and O'Doherty (1985) examine income smoothing and Gamble et al (1987) examine agency theory).…”

Deriving disciplinary structures: Some new methods, models, and an illustration with accounting

“…This study describes extensions of cocitation clustering coupled with content analysis for deriving disciplinary structures. As is well known, cocitation analysis was pioneered in the middle 1970s by Small and Griffith (Small, 1973;Griffith et al, 1974)) and since that time has been applied in many disciplinary areas (including Crawford & Crawford, 1980;Gamble et al, 1987;McCain, 1986McCain, , 1984McCain, , 1983Miyamoto & Nakayama, 1983;Small, 1980;Small & Crane, 1976;Small et al, 1985;White, 1983;White & Griffith, 1981a, 1981b. Cocitation clustering is a method premised on the existence of an intellectual relationship between all documents (or in some work, authors) included in a single bibliography.…”