Well folks that’s a wrap for another year on the old blog!

Lots of folks to thank this year!

• My team of editors, editorial board members and reviewers at BRIA (not to mention Jake and Nate at the AAA)!
• The great set of folks who assisted with my seven week tour of New Zealand and Australia (Mike and Hedy at Massey, Wai Fong and Shana at Sydney, David at Queensland, Kerry, Wei, Ken and Mandy at UNSW!)
• My co-authors this year Yi and Nate at Queen’s, Kris at Alabama, Kerry at UNSW, and Theresa at Central Florida!
• My Dean ( now former Dean) at Smith for his sixteen years of support!
• All my current and former doctoral (and thesis based masters) students! We are now at 15 strong and likely will see a couple of more!

Looking forward to next year, there is still much to do. There will be announcements that will surprise folks, there will be a continued advance on the diversity in research front as our academic discipline continues to grow up (after all we are now close to 50 years old depending on whether you count from B&B, Hopwood or Ashton or Libby (1968, 1972, 1974 or 1975)). . . .

As usual MORE by Steve will continue to call them as he sees them and report on our discipline as it finally enters adulthood! While readers might not always agree with Steve, you know I am giving you my unfiltered fact based reactions to the strange academic world we call home!

So what are MORE’s top ten?  My view is that to be considered a top ten accounting journal you should be a top 10 in at least one list!  What sources did I look at – see the previous post (i.e. SSCI 2018, 2017; SJC 2018; Google Scholar; FT 50 List) leaving aside the 2019 ABDC list.  Then I looked at the number of “top 10 hits” each journal has leaving me with three groups (O, RG, and G) that are listed in alphabetical order within group

Group O (outstanding – on all five top ten lists)

• Accounting Organizations and Society
• (The) Accounting Review
• Journal of Accounting and Economics
• Journal of Accounting Research

Group RG (really great – on four of five top ten lists)

• Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory
• Critical Perspectives in Accounting (Sorry folks – hard to be oppressed when you are tied for top 5 – you can work on it)

Group G (great – on three of five top ten lists)

• Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal
• British Accounting Review
• Contemporary Accounting Research
• European Accounting Review
• Management Accounting Research
• Review of Accounting Studies

So that makes twelve journals in the top ten.  So in the end, MORE and the ABDC have a significant overlap with 11 journals on both lists with one on MORE (see bold above) not on the ABDC thirteen and two on the ABDC thirteen not on MORE’s top ten list!

I made up this little graphic to summarize how I see the evidence about journal rankings. The number column just shows the rank in each of the following sources

• SSCI – Social Science Citation Index (the granddaddy of them all),
• Google Scholar
• SJR : Scientific Journal Rankings
• N/R not included in the ranking source

Also think about the FT 50  where one would say JAR TAR and JAE would be ranked 2 as they were all added the same year, AOS 4 as added three years later, CAR as 5 as added six years later and RAST as 6 being voted in via a ballot exercise immediately after CAR was added by consensus.