Is European Accounting Research Fairly Reflected in Academic Journals? An Investigation of Possible Non-Mainstream and Language Barrier Biases

Collaboration networks in accounting research

“…Canadian (9.27 percent), British (7.62 percent), and Australian (4.14 percent) institutions constitute the majority of the non-USA affiliations; this finding on the frequency of USA-based affiliations and the rarity of contributions from non-English speaking countries is consistent with the results in previous research (e.g., Jones and Roberts, 2005;Raffournier and Schatt, 2010). Among the journals in the data set, AOS is clearly the journal with the less intensive USA representation, with USA institutions being represented in less than one third of published articles at the 2010-2014 period.…”

“…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.…”

International Collaboration in Auditing Research: A Note

“…The dominance of US‐based affiliations is deeply rooted in the association of audit practice and research with important corporate events in the US like the McKesson and Robbins scandal, the Equity Funding Corporation scandal, the Enron scandal, and also major institutional events in the US like the Securities and Exchange Commission Act of 1934 and the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002. Furthermore, this result also echoes previous findings on linguistic and national barriers in accounting research (Raffournier & Schatt, ). In a similar vein, corroborating the importance of national and geographical limits in auditing research, the journals with the strongest representation of non‐US authors are AAAJ and EAR, which are published in Australia and Europe, respectively.…”

R. J. Chambers on Securities and Obscurities: Making a Case for the Reform of the Law of Company Accounts in the 1970s

“…And, whereas this study is about a specific period and setting, the findings resonate with emerging evidence that environmental and material circumstances can be just as (or more) important than the merits of particular ‘accounting ideas’. Contemporary research has found this to be the case when it comes to barriers faced by non‐native English accounting researchers (e.g., Lukka and Kasanen, ; Carmona et al ., ; Raffournier and Schatt, ), shifts in accounting trends (e.g., Clarke, ; Whitley, ; Dean and Clarke, ), and the adoption of management accounting innovations (e.g., Free and Qu, ; Qu and Cooper, ; Free and Qu, ). Our central argument is, therefore, that it is fruitful for researchers to consider the effects that circumstances have on ‘accounting ideas’ of all kinds.…”