Frankly I continue to be amazed at the ongoing changes that JAR is experiencing.  Nearly fifteen years after the “night of knives” when all psychology based accounting researchers and many analytic researchers that did not fit the “Ball”-ian criteria of doing accounting research (including most auditors, tax people, management accountants) JAR is gradually emerging as a general interest accounting journal both from a paradigmatic and a substantive accounting topic perspective.

While the trend has been a somewhat bumpy one, over the last five years gradually the journal has been publishing more experiments (including this year experiments in financial accounting, management accounting and most recently auditing). furthermore, it is beginning to publish management accounting research that delves into firms rather than explores public data bases and associates them with market variables of interest (I always have a hard time telling the difference between these studies and capital markets financial reporting studies but that is probably just me).  As near as I can tell we are getting back to a JAR that is about as open as it was when Katherine Schipper was unceremoniously dumped as Editor in the late 1990s.

Now if only JAR would become as open as it was in the 1970’s . . . . . . .  Or is that too much to hope for as JAR matures to fifty years old!