I am Sherlock Holmes fan, the nerdy Holmes not the sexy ones. I wonder what Holmes would find out if he investigated the case of the Missing Citations? Almost 25 years ago Larry Brown carried out a detailed study of citations of accounting research and concluded that an article with 4 ( four) cites a year in the SSCI ( known to younger readers as web of science) from the time it was published was a “classic” accounting article!

Now I think I have authored a couple of ” classics” but a wonder what the cutoff would be these days? Also, I wonder what % of top journal articles are never cited in Accounting? Finally, and to me the key question is, is it a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for an article to be cited for it to matter?

Mulling over these thoughts!