A long time ago I laughed at my good friend Gord Richardson when he talked about the need to transfer findings across silos in financial accounting empirical research!  I teased that if this is what we needed to diversify our research we were in real trouble.  In part I was right, but in part I was wrong – I knew that at the time.

Indeed, I saw an application of this very problem last weekend at the information systems assurance symposium I attended.  Three AIS researchers did an analysis of the contents of PCAOB inspection reports to determine what they said about information systems controls.  Now one would think that AIS and Audit research are close enough that folks would read each others work.  Nope!!!!  Next to no references in the paper to the extensive work done in audit research on PCAOB report contents and types of misstatements disclosed.  Not only is this a huge waste of time for the research team but it results in research that is of the quality that was done in auditing a decade ago!!!!

I was too tired to enter the fray, but please folks, do proper literature reviews – at least across the domain of accounting and auditing journals.  Given the low-cost of search, we should be able to rely on every researcher to be up to date on developments affecting areas that they think they are qualified to write a paper in.  OR am I asking too much????