I guess it bears repeating as I get asked this at almost every time I open the floor for doctoral students and junior faculty member questions – association journals in accounting do NOT have favorite topics.

Journals tend to publish a reasonably representative sample of what is submitted to them – even the American 3 as I like to call them.  TAR does this in accordance with its mandate and JAR/ JAE do it by author self selection not to submit papers.

You may say well there are very few of this or that published in this or that journal.  Well how many submissions were received on this or that topic??  You see, we can observe the numerator but not the denominator.  Well, I can tell you I have seen the denominator at more than one journal and in context it sure makes the numerator look impressive.

The sad part is that there is a huge amount of self censorship in our business.  Nobody likes rejection but the old saying holds, a journal cannot publish papers on topic X using method Y if no one submits such papers.  Indeed, before one can declare a bias at least 15 papers on XY need to be rejected given a 10 % acceptance rate and allowing for sampling bounce.  Likely this under estimates sampling bounce!

From high in the mountains of Virginia . .