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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 . . . .).
The day before the deluge
Setting here in hot and muggy Washington DC after doing my first event of the AAA. The joint journal editors/publications committee meeting. One of the key messages is that there is a strong likelihood of a major disruptive event in academic publishing over the next X years, where X is a small number greater than 6 months and less than 60 months. I think most editors in the room were oblivious to this trend or the potential importance of it to academic publishing. But then again, as the old saying goes “it is hard to remember the objective was to empty the swamp when you have alligators biting your butt!” I will let you make the analogy.
What would this event be? It will be likely to be around the integration of data sets, analysis code, video technology and a change in the publishing platform of record – the traditional PDF file towards a technology that easily integrates these other aspects. Hearing this I am glad that my current research team is working on a video version of our latest research – on audit research knowledge transfer to standard setters. I thought it would be a good means to communicate our message to the standard setting community but it may indeed become part of the version of record of our final article if these trends move as fast as expected. Hope to unveil the video by mid-September!!!
more “interesting” BRIA papers
We continue on our mission to learn more about research methods by examining two issues in this first year.
- how do on-line worker’s differ from the general population? W. Brink et al give us some interesting insights into how the values of on-line workers depart from that of the general population. No surprise here really, I certainly expected them to be different, but what ones? how extensive? were they in areas of interest to accounting researchers? These are all discussed in this paper.
- Recently I accepted a review of dual process theories of human decision making applied to financial accounting and investing. We recently have seen an uptick in research using dual process theories in both audit and financial accounting research. Griffiths et al (2016) in AJPT discussed the issue from an audit perspective. Winchel and Hamilton have a forthcoming piece in BRIA looking at it from the application of finanical accounting. One of the key observations among many that they make is that “heuristic or intuitive or peripheral processing or type 1 thinking” (they all mean in essence the same thing with slight variations) has got a really bad rap over the years, because experimenters set up experimental tasks in such a way that it is rare that deep thinking (i.e. a more rational person approach) does not win. They point out implicitly, that if this type of thinking was a bad as experimental researchers portray it, we as a species would not have survived so long. Anyhow, great paper that provides a unifying framework to consider a lot of financial accounting experimental and archival research and that suggests a lot of research directions for the future! I can foresee a few dissertation papers coming out of this one!!!
One of the neat things about dual process theories is that they are strongly supported by neuroscience evidence and they combine a lot of smaller phenomena (with associated theories) from psychology into one overall theoretical framework. In other words the commonalities of dual processing theories show that the notion that psychology is all over the map with its theorizing is not really the case. Those of us who have thought carefully about this know it, but for many researchers (even psychology based ones) they still find this surprising!
dJ
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 