Home » The case for the radical center
Category Archives: The case for the radical center
CAR and mission accomplished
I am going to pat myself on the back in this post!
But I thought this cAR related event should not go without passing.
EVERY issue of CAR this year has had at least one interpretivist field paper published in it. A couple had positivist field qualitative papers as well. They represent a most interesting set of topics that expands the mind!
In other words the breadth revolution started by Richardson and Salterio in 2001 is firmly ensconced at CAR. This year we also had external validation of the effectiveness of that strategy when research compared the outcomes of CAR’s diversity approach versus TAR’s approach to diversity. See Signaling effects of scholarly profiles – The editorial teams of North American accounting association journals” in Volume 51 2018 of Critical Perspectives on Accounting.
Mind you I paid a price for ensuring that this revolution succeeded in light of the attempt some in the CAAA to turn back the clock with the appointment of my successor as CAR EIC. I think that the forceful position I took may well have contributed greatly to stopping the clock from being turned back.
But sometimes you have to pay a price to do the right thing! But it sure feels good to have made a change for the better!!!! ( end of patting on back)!,
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 cites wars part 2
Of course the differences in the two lists are interesting as well. If the Scopus data base is truly just more comprehensive than the JCR base in the SSCI, should the number of cites not just be uniformly higher in Citescore albeit with ranking changes still possible?
Well that does not appear to be so! JAR picks up almost a 0.25 per article while the CPA difference is a result of rounding at the third decimal place. Yes in six cases the cite number did go down from Citescore to JCR, as would be expected if Scopus is just a larger database than the SSCI, but there are those two troublesome outliers!
But while accountants and auditors can wonder what this means the real question remains? Is this just better measurement of citation rates or is it picking up on a radical shift in accounting journals impact? Basically we the so-called top 6 journals really just a figment of measurement error due to incomplete data? Does this imply the FT 50 needs to be rethought? I surely do not know the answers to these questions but silly schools that attempt to reduce rather than expand their set of high quality journals can have only one fate awaiting them – derision from broader society!!!
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 