Abstract
The Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) recently completed 25 years of publication. We provide a descriptive analysis of RAST’s characteristics that should interest the stakeholders who have been part of the journal’s evolution. We benchmark RAST’s characteristics against the other top accounting journals: Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, the Accounting Review, and Contemporary Accounting Research. We provide information on RAST’s most prominent subject matter themes, methodologies used by RAST authors, the journals citing RAST, RAST’s most highly cited papers for different periods, and affiliated institutions and countries of RAST’s most prolific and cited authors. Results show that RAST has developed unique expertise in valuation and financial statement analysis, arguably becoming the market leader despite being the youngest journal among its peer group. It now publishes the highest number of articles among non-association journals. RAST continues to make inroads into Asian countries emerging as new research centers.
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Data Availability
The data are available from Satish Kumar upon request.
Notes
Retrospective studies often highlight a journal’s milestones, such as a specific anniversary (Schwert 1993). Examples include Brown and Gardner (1985), Contemporary Accounting Research; Heck and Bremser (1986), the Accounting Review; Schwert (1993), Journal of Financial Economics; and Amiguet et al. (2017), Journal of Political Economy.
These editors are Gerald Feltham, John S. Hughes, James Ohlson, Stefan Reichelstein, and Stephen Penman.
Patricia Dechow (2019–present), the current editor, is from the University of Southern California. Former editors and their original affiliations are John Hughes (1996–1997, Duke University), Stefan Reichelstein (1998–2001, University of California, Berkeley), Stephen Penman (2002–2006, Columbia University), Stanley Baiman (2007–2009, University of Pennsylvania), Richard G. Sloan (2010–2012, University of California, Berkeley), Russell J. Lundholm (2012–2015, University of British Columbia), and Paul E. Fischer (2015–2019, University of Pennsylvania).
For the Google Scholar journal rankings, see.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=bus_accountingtaxation.
For the CABS AJG rating, see https://charteredabs.org/academic-journal-guide-2018/. For the ABDC journal ranking, see https://abdc.edu.au/research/abdc-journal-list/.
For the 2019 FT 50 journal list, see https://www.inkpothub.com/research-insights/what-is-ft-50/.
We put accounting information system articles in the “other” category. Brigham Young University is the source of the categories for methodology and subject matter themes. See https://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php.
Google Scholar, another option, typically has more citations than Scopus. We use Scopus because it permits further analysis and drawing linkages among articles that are impossible with Google Scholar.
Determining these thresholds involves judgment because methodological guides are unavailable beyond providing a better graphical representation. Other bibliometric researchers express similar views about determining which documents to include for analysis (Hota et al. 2020). Because the number of documents available in each period differs, so do the thresholds. The thresholds are one (1996–2000), two (2001–2005, 2006–2010, and 2016–2020), and three (2011–2015).
We limit this section’s scope to identifying the most cited RAST articles by subperiod and cluster. Follow-up meta and review studies could examine the reasons for these articles’ high rankings, their main findings, the nature of their association, and their implications to the accounting profession. Those topics are beyond the scope of a bibliometric paper.
Bibliometric coupling, involving the similarity of references and the network to which those references belong, is the basis of these thematic clusters. A cluster’s name could differ from what an article’s title suggests.
The titles of some articles in a cluster may appear unrelated to a cluster’s name. The reason stems from the methodology used to determine clusters. Bibliographic coupling uses citation analysis, not article titles, to establish relationships between documents.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Patricia Dechow (editor) for her encouragement and feedback on this invited paper and the two anonymous reviewers constructive comments for improving the paper. We also acknowledge financial support from the Haskayne School of Business, the University of Calgary, and the Canada Research Chair program of the Government of Canada.
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Baker, H.K., Kumar, S., Pandey, N. et al. The Review of Accounting Studies at age 25: a retrospective using bibliometric analysis. Rev Account Stud 29, 1997–2029 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-022-09743-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-022-09743-8
Keywords
- Bibliometric analysis
- Accounting journals
- Review of Accounting Studies
- Performance analysis
- Science mapping
- Bibliographic coupling
- Citations analysis