Debating Accounting Research Journal Rankings: Empirical Issues from a Citation-based Analysis and Theoretical Dilemmas from Economics

This paper reports the results of a citation-based analysis of accounting research journals. From a database developed from the citations to 27 accounting research journals within those same 27 research journals over the ten-year period 1990-1999, this paper reports the relative use (in terms of citation) of the 27 journals. From both the entire citation set, and also from subsets drawn by the geographical base of the journal (e.g. Non-US, US), the geographical base of the authors (e.g. US, Non-US), and whether the journals appear in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), various measures of journal impact are developed. These relative impact measures are then used to examine journal rankings derived from peer-based surveys conducted in the UK (Brinn et al., 1996) and the US (Hull & Wright, 1990; Brown and Huefner, 1994). This study also draws on Arrow’s (1951) work on social preference functions to question the theoretical validity of journal ranking studies. The findings from this study suggest that other than for a very few journals, accounting journals receive largely indifferent use, and, individually, appear to have very little general relevance to accounting academics as a whole. Also reported is the diversity of citation behaviour, both between US-based authors and non-US based authors, and across different journals. Such diversity, when combined with Arrow’s work, seems to throw into serious doubt the theoretical validity of some attempts to generate universal journal rankings even within a single country.