Celebrating Success: Professor Simon Hussain & Dr Lana Liu

Congratulations to Simon and Lana on the recent acceptance of their paper “Accounting as a dichotomised discipline: An analysis of the source materials used in the construction of accounting articles” in Critical Perspectives on Accounting. This paper highlights some adverse impacts with use of journal ranking lists, particularly on research adopting critical, interpretive and interdisciplinary (CII) approaches.

Abstract:

Academic research in accounting has often been characterised as exhibiting a dichotomy between the positivist approach and the critical, interpretive and interdisciplinary (CII) approaches. Our paper examines the extent of this dichotomy by presenting empirical evidence on the different source materials which the two communities use to construct their research papers. We find that positivist papers tend to be constructed from a narrower set of references drawn mostly from elite business journals while CII papers draw from a much more diverse range of sources, including non-elite journals, non-business journals and books. There is also evidence of the growing impact of journal ranking lists, with notable upward (downward) trends in the usage of high-ranked (unranked) reference sources. We suggest a link here with recent research on signalling within the publication process.