The financial economics literature has experienced rapid growth over the past 40 years, triggering a dramatic increase in the number of journals. We employ a new method to analyze the current pecking order of finance journals. Specifically, we analyze the publication records of prolific authors to provide evidence regarding the perceived quality of a set of 23 high‐impact finance journals. Assuming these scholars target the “best” research outlets, their publication records can reveal information about their subjective rankings of the next‐best alternatives to the traditional elite finance journals. The results suggest that prolific authors are most likely to target outlets that have raised their profile in recent years (e.g., Financial Management and Financial Analysts Journal) and new specialized finance journals (e.g., Journal of Financial Markets, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Journal of Financial Intermediation) when publishing outside the set of elite journals.
In her presidential message to the American Accounting Association (AAA) in August 2005, Judy Rayburn discussed the issue of the relatively low citation rate for accounting research compared to finance, management, and marketing. Rayburn concluded that accounting's low citation rate was due to a lack of diversity in topics and research methods. In this paper, we provide a review of the AAA's flagship journal, The Accounting Review (TAR), following its 80 years of publication, and describe why some recent AAA leaders believe that significant changes should be made to the journal's publication and editorial policies. At issue is whether scholarly accounting research is overly focused on mathematical analysis and empirical research, or “accountics” as it has sometimes been called, at the expense of research that benefits the general practice of accountancy and discovery research on more interesting topics. We conclude from our review of TAR that after mostly publishing research about accounting practices for the first 40 years, a sweeping change in editorial policy occurred in the 1960s and 1970s that narrowly defined scholarly research in accounting as that which employs accountics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.