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Really, we can’t all publish in the American 3?!
Kris Hardies ( a heck of a good sort and one I am normally sypatico with) recently published a blog entry at the EAA ARC ( https://arc.eaa-online.org/blog/we-simply-cant-all-be-publishing-top-journals ). Really? “No sh*t Sherlock” as an expression, somewhat blue in nature, goes in North America! (Expression means, for non North American English readers, that is not a surprise with an allusion to the famous fictional British “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes).
Kris’s argument is that there are at least 3000 publishing Accounting academics in the world and over a five year period there is not room for three thousand authors in the American Three! But who has agency here?
Is it not our fellow academy members in our own universities that decide we will only count Three ( or 4 or 5 or 6 or 10) journals? When I see commentaries like this I just cringe as it assumes that bright PHD’s have no agency in the matter!! You can find a different school, you can fight for change in your school, you can publish where you want and challenge any negative performance evaluation as arbitrary and unreasonable!
The one thing you should not do is to attempt to blindly conform and not publish your research at all in the best journals you can publish in! After all countless prize winning articles have been published outside the American Three. Yet to not publish at all is the reaction I have seen frequently to such edicts by schools and rants like Kris’s ( sorry Kris . . . .).
A longer blog vacation than a real one!
I thought I would be back blogging a lot sooner than I was! The end of summer rush at BRIA caught me by surprise (although I should know better). A bit more disconcerting was the passing of founding BRIA Editor Ken Euske over the summer! In any event I am back.
First my condolences to Professor Euske’s family. We at BRIA will not leave his death unmarked and there are several folks helping to get together an appropriate memorial article about his contributions to the academy.
Second, we continue to be fortunate with the set of papers sent into BRIA. But folks need to realize I am not, despite my rep in some circles, the journal. Sometimes I will suggest authors submit papers to the journal and both reviewers say “NO”! That is why I have only solicited one paper during my editorship and that paper is a 30 year retrospective about the academic accounting research world from a social and behavioural perspective. All other papers have outcome uncertainty associated with submission. Indeed, the only time I have ever gone against both reviewers saying “NO” is when I ex ante documented why I expected them to say “no” and that is what they said with the expected reasons!
AAA – the broom closet with no room for brooms
About a decade ago if you had held a panel session on qualitative accounting research at the AAA you could have held it in a broom closet with room left over. Today over 100 folks came to a panel discussion at the AAA on quality in qualitative research! Even better was the fact slightly less than half the room had done it and nearly 100% were interested in doing so!
Most of my readers are familiar with my views on research diversity and the need to use the most appropriate methods to identify and address practice issues. Field research enhances your engagement with the field of practice ( however you define practice). And with doctoral programs like Georgia, Illinois, UMASS Amherest all recently graduating PHD’s with this method in their toolkit, we may be on the verge of the breakthrough I have long advocated for in the USA. Further the placements of those students has been stellar Emory, WISCONSIN, Northeastern, and more.
This combined with the first qualitative interview paper being published in TAR in the last 30 years coming this fall, along with the combined survey interview research being done by Shiva Rajgopal (Columbia) and Michel Clements (Texas) and others in financial accounting published in JAE and JAR means the ” big 6″ Accounting journals ( however you define them from among TAR, CAR, AOS, JAE, CPA, JAR, MAR, AAAJ, AJPT, RAST) have all published such research in recent years – many with multiple articles!
And that’s the way I see it at the first day of work at the AAA.
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 