If the evidence based policy making project in auditing and financial accounting is to move forward I believe there are four key players in the world.  Accounting Horizons (USA), Accounting Perspectives (Canada), Accounting in Europe (i.e. Europe) and Australian Accounting Review.  Each of those journals has the mandate from its publishers to be a link between practice and academic research.

Imagine if each of those journals committed to publish a research synthesis that meets the criteria of the Centre for Evidence Based Management   in each issue of their journals.  That would mean we would quickly have proof of concept of the utility of the research synthesis as the unit of knowledge transfer to standard setters and regulators.  The criteria for such research syntheses would have to be set high, but it is not as if there is not lots of help available to make those evaluations.  In particular the Campbell Collaborative   has a robust set of tools that Hoang, Luo and Salterio (2019) have shown transfer well to the audit standard setting domain.

For a discussion of what an evidence based research synthesis would look like, see Hoang, Salterio and Sylph (2018) in Accounting Perspectives  and Salterio, Hoang and Luo on SSRN .

To see the creation of a research synthesis in real time, see our video