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Using Google Scholar citations to rank accounting programs: a global perspective

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Abstract

We conduct an assessment on accounting program research performance based on Google Scholar citations for all articles from a set of 23 quality accounting journals during 1991–2010. Our work is a new approach in accounting by directly measuring the impact of the faculty research in accounting programs. We find that the top-5 accounting programs are the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Harvard University. These top programs produce a large number of high impact articles. In addition, using the mean citations from all articles in a journal, we find that the Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) is a top-5 journal, replacing Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR).

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Notes

  1. See http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/Departments/Accounting.aspx (accessed on December 18, 2011).

  2. See http://www.business.illinois.edu/accountancy/news_accountancy/News_Item.aspx?ID=1430 (accessed on December 19, 2011).

  3. Other business discipline, such as finance, also uses such an approach. For instance, Heck (2007) uses a raw count of the total number of research articles to rank US finance doctoral programs.

  4. The detailed selection process is in the Appendix of Chan et al. (2013).

  5. Following Chan et al. (2013), we do not include editorials, comments, replies, book/product reviews, report, announcement, award, tribute, obituary, and erratum.

  6. Our ranking results are qualitatively the same without adjusting for coaffiliations. They are available upon request.

  7. See Chan et al. (2009) and Chan and Liano (2009).

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Acknowledgments

An earlier verion of the paper was presented at the American Accounting Association conference in Washington D.C., in 2012. We acknowledge the helpful comments from two anoymous reviewers. Tong and Zhang would like to express appreciation for the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (approval number: 71002058, 71202090, 71202091). The usual caveats apply.

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Correspondence to Kam C. Chan.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Table 6 An Illustration of how weighted normalized citations are calculated
Table 7 Normal citations changes over sub-periods
Table 8 Mean normalized citations of accounting journals in Google Scholar in sub-periods
Table 9 A global ranking of accounting departments based on weighted normalized citations (WNC) in 23 accounting journals (1997–2010)

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Chan, J.Y., Chan, K.C., Tong, J.Y. et al. Using Google Scholar citations to rank accounting programs: a global perspective. Rev Quant Finan Acc 47, 29–55 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11156-014-0493-x

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