the familiarity with and perceived quality of accounting journals: views of senior accounting...

The Familiarity with and Perceived Qualityof Accounting Journals:

Views of Senior Accounting Faculty inLeading U.S. MBA Programs*

LAWRENCE D. BROWN State University of New York at Buffalo

RONALD J. HUEFNER State University of New York.at Buffalo

Abstract. DetermiHing familiarity with and evaluating quality of accounting jour-nals are of interest to various parties in accounting academia. In recant years, thenartiber of accounting journals has grown, and many special-interest subgroupshave arisen. This study surveys senior faculty at Business Week's "best 40 MBAprograms" to determine their familiarity with and quality perceptions of 44accounting journals. As to familiarity, 5 Journals were nearly universally known,and: a total of 15 had wide recognition. Financial, managerial, and auditing facultyexhibited similar familiarity patterns, while tax faculty had a somewhat differeHtpatterri. As to quality perceptions, relatively few Journals achieved high qualityevaluations. There was, however, genera! consensus across the different subject-area faculty as to the top Journals. Special consideration was given to the newer(post-1980) Journals. Six of the 19 newer Journals in the study achieved high famil-iarity scores, and 3 achieved high quality evaluations.

Presume. Le degr^ de connaissance des publications comptables et la perception de!a quaiit^ de ces publications sont des sujets qui interessent divers membres de lacomnmnaEt^ universitaire oeuvrant daas le domaine comptable. Depuis quelquesannees, le nombre des publications comptables a augment^, et maints sous-groupes d'interet particuliers oat vu le Jour. Les auteurs ont realise un sondageaaprfes de professeurs d'experience enseignant dans le cadre des quarantemeilleara programmes MBA repertories par Business Week, afin de determinerdaHS quelie mesure ils connaissaient 44 publications comptables et quelle etait leurperception de la qualite de ces publications. En ce qui a trait & la connaissance,5 publications sont presque universellement connues et 15 au total ont un grandrayor<nsment. Les professeurs de finance, de gestion et de verification ont affichedes profils de connaissance analogues, tandis que les professeurs de fiscalitepr&eiitaient un profil quelque peu different. Quant h la perception, de la quaiite,relaiivemeat peu de publications ont obtenu la cote « quality eievee ». L'OD acepeTzdant observe un consensus general chez les professeurs des differentes disci-plinei BE ce qui a trait aux publications de prestige. Une attention particuli6re a

* The authors acknowledge the assistance of Seok-Woo Jeong, Wonsun Paek, Chery!Tubisz, and two anonymous reviewers.

CoMemporary Accounting Research VoL 11 No. l-I (Summer 1994) pp 223-250 ©CAAA

224 Contemporary Accounting Research

6t6 accord^e aux publications plus r^centes (post6rieures k 1980). Six des 19 publi-cations plus r^centes de l'^tude ont obtenu une cote 6\ev6e relativement au degr6de connaissance, et 3 d'entre elles ont obteau une cote 6lev6e relativement h laquality.

Evaluating the quality of accounting research journals has long been atopic of interest. Editors and others connected with a given journal areinterested in the "market" assesstnent of their product, while individualfaculty need to make judgments in the placement of their research.Although a faculty member's decisions may be motivated by shorter-termpromotion and tenure decisions (e.g., the probability that a given journalwill accept a paper and the length of turnaround time), longer-term inter-ests are also at stake. Developing a reputation as a scholar is aided byplacing one's research in visible, highly regarded journals. Similarly, thedevelopment of a school's reputation for research is affected by the deci-sions its faculty makes in placing their research. Accounting administra-tors often use journal quality as one indicator of the quality of theresearch record of a candidate for faculty appointment, promotion, ortenure. University promotion and tenure committees, lacking first-handfamiliarity with a candidate's work, often rely on journal quality indicatorsand letters from external reviewers as surrogates for research quality.Accounting administrators need to select external reviewers for promo-tion and tenure cases. Knowing how various journals are perceived bygroups of faculty at well-known schools should be helpful in choosingappropriate external reviewers.

Two changes in accounting academia in recent years have complicatedthese tasks. First, the academic accounting profession has become increas-ingly fractionalized. The American Accounting Association (AAA), theprimary professional group for North American accounting academics,has 14 special-interest sections. Total section membership aggregatesabout 11,500 individuals, and the AAA has about 8,000 members. Thus,each member on average belongs to one or two sections. Some sectionshave extensive levels of activity, perhaps supplanting the umbrella AAAas the primary organization for many faculty. As faculty become morespecialized in their interests, their abilities to evaluate research and to befamiliar with the quality of research journals outside their specialty islikely to deteriorate. Second, there has been a proliferation of accountingjournals. Of the 44 journals included in this study, 19 have originated since1980. The higher the number of journals, the less likely it is that any oneindividual will be familiar with many of them, and the more difficult it isfor a given journal to be widely perceived as being of high quality. A per-son serving as an external reviewer for a promotion or tenure case mayhave difficulty assessing the standing of many of the journals in a candi-date's research portfolio.

Familiarity with aod Perceived Quality of Accounting Journals 225

To gain insight into the familiarity with and perceived quality ofaccouoting Journals, we surveyed senior faculty at a group of well-knownschools. More specifically, we surveyed all 367 associate and full profes-sors at the "best 40 MBA programs" as designated by Business Week'sGuide to the Best Business Schools (Byrne 1991). Each respondent wasasked to assign a quality rating to each of 44 accounting journals or if notsafficiently familiar with a particular journal to assign such a rating, toindicate a lack of familiarity. We also asked these individuals to classifytheir own area(s) of specialty as auditing, financial, managerial, or taxa-tion accounting. The survey was administered in March 1992.

Prior MterstiireCitation analysis and opinion surveys are the two primary ways to evalu-ate journals. Papers adopting a citation approach for evaluating account-ing journals include McRae (1974), Dyckman and Zeff (1984), Brown andGardner (1985), and Smith and Krogstad (1988). Those adopting an opin-ion survey approach include Benjamin and Brenner (1974); Coe andWeinstock (1983); Howard and Nikolai (1983); Raabe, Kozub, andSanders (1987); Schroeder, Payne, and Harris (1988); and Hull and Wright(1990).

Brown and Gardner (1985) and Hull and Wright (1990) discuss thestrengths and weaknesses of citation analysis and opinion suiveys, respec-tively. The general presumption of citation analysis is that the number ofcitations a journal receives is an objective measure of its impact or influ-ence. There have been some studies validating this presumption (Clark1957; Cole and Cole 1967; Garfield 1973; Virgo 1977), but critics of cita-tion analysis argue that many citations are negative rather than positive(Croom 1970). Moreover, critics argue that citations are biased in favor ofcertain authors, namely those "popular" authors who enjoy a "halo effect"(May 1967), authors who write review articles (Woodward and Henson1976), and those whose papers are methodological or are iia establishedfields with many researchers (Margolis 1967).

Opinion surveys tend to avoid the difficulties of citation studies men-tioned above. Criticisms of opinion surveys, however, include responsebias, sample representation bias, and position bias. Response bias occurs ifthe opinions of respondents differ from those of nonrespondents. SamplereprescRtation bias means that the results are not applicable to groupsthat are not sampled. Position bias comes about because the order inwhich the Journals are listed biases responses in a certain way (the "frara-ing" problem). We assess the extent of these biases on our study hi a sub-sequent section. Although both citation and opinion survey approachesliave their strengths and weaknesses, we adopted an opinion surveyapproach because many accounting journals are not included in the SocialScience Citation Index, the database of citing journals commonly used bycitation analysis studies.!


Raabe, Kozub, and Sanders (1987) conducted the first opinion surveyto include Journal of Accounting and Economics.'^ They surveyed approxi-mately 700 accounting faculty teaching at least one tax course andobtained 207 usable responses. Respondents were asked to assign pointsto a main section taxation article, by a single author, based on their per-ception of the value of that journal to their department. Taxes—The TaxMagazine was assigned 100 points to anchor the scale. The mean pointsassigned by all respondents indicated the "top 5" of 25 journals to be theJournal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, the National TaxJournal, the Journal of Taxation, and the Journal of the AmericanTaxation Association.^

Schroeder, Payne, and Harris (1988) surveyed 183 assistant professors,183 associate professors, and 183 full professors at doctoral-granting and(ali remaining) accounting programs accredited by the American Assemblyof Collegiate Schools of Business to determine the respondents' percep-tions of quality and familiarity with 80 journals. Quality and familiaritywere both rated on scales of 1 (highest) to 4. Their results, based on 193responses, revealed the five "highest quality" journals to be TheAccounting Review; the Journal of Accounting Research; the Journal ofAccounting and Economics; Tax Law Review; and Accounting,Organizations and Society. The five "most familiar" journals were TheAccounting Review, the Journal of Accountancy, the Journal of AccountingResearch, Management Accounting, and the CPA JoumaL^

Hull and Wright (1990) surveyed 783 accounting faculty who holdearned doctorates or LLM degrees and who teach at U.S. institutions toask their opinions of 79 journals. The overall rank by 278 respondents (36percent response rate) of the top five accounting journals were theJournal of Accounting Research; The Accounting Review; the Journal ofAccounting and Economics; Accounting, Organizations and Society; andthe Journal of the American Taxation Association.^ Segmenting their sam-ple by area of specialization (i.e., auditing, financial, managerial, and taxaccounting), they found only the first three journals to rank in the top fivein all areas of specialization. The auditing area had the same top five asthe overall sample (albeit in a different order); the financial and manager-ial areas' top five had the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance inlieu of the Journal of the American Taxation Association; and the tax areatop five had the National Tax Journal'mXie.u oi Accounting Organizations,and Society.

MethodThe opinions of all scholars are unlikely to carry equal weight in shapingthe quality perceptions of journals. The perceptions of senior professors atthe top business schools are likely to carry relatively more weight in influ-encing the decisions of authors, readers, and administrators. For example,

Familiarity with and Perceived Quality of Accounting Journals 227

exteraa! reviewers for promotion and tenure cases are typically selectedfrom peer-level schools or higher. Having a reviewer from a "name"school helps lo convince university review committees that the reviewer isqualified and that the review is worthy of regard. We thus selected the1991 edition of the Business Week "best 40" MBA programs as represent-ing the ieading U.S. busine^ schools. We surveyed all associate and Mlaccounting professors at those schools to ensure that respondents wereexperienced academics. We identified 367 such faculty using theAccounting Faculty Directory (Hasselback 1992); 181 usable responseswere obtained (49.3 percent response rale). By area of specialty, therewere 96 financial, 49 managerial, 34 auditing, and 27 tax faculty.6

Selecting any set of journals is subject to some degree of arbitrariness.Worldwide, the number of academic and professional Journals in account-ing is so large that a subset must necessarily be used. We attempted toselect joumais that would be reasonably likely outlets for the research ofU.S. accounting academics.^ Specifically, we selected the following:

1. The 31 active Journals included in the Accounting Literature Index(1992 edition) by Heck, Derstine, and Huefner.8

2. Thirteen additional journals whose name contained a form of thewords accounting, auditing, tax, or systems and that we Judged to be aJouroal that, might have some breadth of recognition.^

Respondents were asked to assign a rating of 1, 2, 3, or 4 to each ofthe 44 journals. The con.text of the question was faculty promotion cases,in which the quality of Joumais must be identified for the benefit of deci-sion makers beyond the departmental level. Five response categories weredefined in the questionnaire as follows:

1. Most prestigious journals. These journals are widely recognized asthe primary outlets for articles in accounting. Most of the leadingarticles in accounting appear in these journals. Publication in theseJoumais is viewed as very prestigious and highly visible.

2. Significant journals. These journals are respected as typically contain-ing articles of good quality but are not as widely recognized as thecategof}' 1 Journals. Publication in these journals is viewed as a signif-icant accomplishment.

3. Creditable journals. These journals have some degree of recognitionand contain work of varying quality. Publication in them is viewed asa contribution but not as significant as a publication in a category 2journai.

4. Insignificant journals. These journals have extremely little recogni-tion or visibility and are not viewed as meaningful outlets for acade-mic authors.

NF, Not familiar. If you are not sufficiently familiar with the Journal,please indicate with the symbol NF.


Journal familiarityOne prerequisite of a perception of journal quality is that accounting aca-demics be familiar with the journal. As noted earlier, the number ofaccounting journals has expanded significantly over the years, to the pointthat it is unlikely that anyone could be familiar with all of them. Further,the increased specialization of accounting academics, and correspondinglyof the journals, suggests that many specialized journals will have littlefamiliarity outside the subgroup of academics in that field. We first exam-ine the results in terms of journal familiarity, defined as the percentage ofrespondents who assigned a quality rating to the journal (i.e., did notchoose the NF response).lo Table 1 presents journal familiarity data for allrespondents and for the four subject-area subsets.

General results for familiarityFor all respondents, familiarity ranged from a high of 98.34 percent forThe Accounting Review to a low of 18.75 percent for Public Finance &Accountancy. Five journals had familiarity ratings in excess of 90 percent:The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accountancy, the Journal ofAccounting Research, Accounting Horizons, and the Journal ofAccounting and Economics.^^ A total of 15 journals had familiarity ratingsin excess of 80 percent.

The financial accounting subset, being the largest, closely paralleledthe full group, as would be expected. The Pearson correlation coefficient^^(r) was 0.99. The managerial accounting and auditing subgroups alsotended to parallel the full group (r = 0.89 and 0.87, respectively). Further,the familiarity rankings among financial, managedal, and auditing acade-mics were quite similar; the Pearson correlation coefficients range from0.77 (managerial with auditing) to 0.89 (financial with managerial).i3

When the tax subgroup is considered, substantially greater variabil-ity occurs. The Pearson correlation coefficient of the tax subgroup withthe full group is 0.42 and ranges from 0.08 (managerial) to 0.36 (finan-cial) for the other subgroups. Taxes—The Tax Magazine was first infamiliarity with tax faculty, yet it ranked no higher than 30th among theother groups. Several other journals very familiar to tax faculty were notfamiliar to other subgroups. Five of the eight journals most familiar totax faculty ranked in the lower half of familiarity for the all-respondentsgroup.

Thus, financial, managerial, and auditing faculty exhibited a highdegree of commonality in the set of Journals with which they were famil-iar, but tax faculty had a quite different set of familiar journals. The differ-ences were not pronounced amorig the most highly recognized journals.The five journals that had more than 90 percent familiarity in the all-respondents group had at least 77 percent familiarity in any subgroup.These journals are well established and, for the most part, are fairly broadin their topical coverage. But when one gets beyond the five most familiar


journals, and particularly into the realm of specialized journals, fanailiaritybegins to vary among the subgroups.

The limits of familiarityGiven the large number of journals, it is not surprising that some of themdo not achieve a high degree of familiarity. Seventeen journals achieved afamiliarity rating of 70 percent or higher in the all-respondents category.Journals achieving this degree of familiarity at the subgroup level were 16for Ihe financial, 18 for the managerial, 24 for the auditing, and 16 for thetax subset. Only 8 Journals were common to all groups: the 5 aforemen-tioned most familiar journals and the Journal of Accounting and PublicPolicy, Issues in Accounting Education, and The CPA Journal

The auditing faculty appear to be the "best informed," with 24 jour-nals achieving high (at least 70 percent) familiarity. This view is enhancedby considering which subgroup is most and which subgroup is least, famil-iar with the journals:

Number of journals forwhich this group had Number of journals forhighest familiarity score which this group had(includes three ties) lowest familiarity score

Financial faculty 4 3Managerial faculty 6 7Auditing faculty 29 0Tax faculty 8 34

Auditing faculty exhibit the broadest extent of familiarity; tax faculty havethe narrowest.

Familiarity with newer JournalsNineteen of the 44 journals studied began publication after 1980, with 11 ofthem having been established since 1985. Table 2 focuses on the percent-age of respondents indicating familiarity with the 19 newer journals.Accounting Horizons (1987) tied for third in familiarity and had high famil-iarity among all subgroups. This is not surprising, because this journalachieved immediate high circulation by its distribution to all AmericanAccounting Association membere. Two other newer journals also achievedtop 10 familiarity. Contemporary Accounting Research (1984) tied for sixthplace. This journal, published by the Canadian Academic AccountingAssociation, built its visibility from a non-U.S. base. It had a natural con-stituency in Canada, but not elsewhere.!'* It has achieved in excess of 85percent familiarity by all groups except tax faculty (and even in that groupit ranks in the top half). The Journal of Accounting and Public Policy(1982) ranked ninth, achieving in excess of 80 percent familiarity by all


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groups except tax faculty (where again it ranks in the top half). This journalbuilt its visibility without any membership constituency.

The newer journals have a fairly balanced familiarity distribution.Nine of the 19 newer journals rank in the top half of the familiarity list,and 10 rank in the lower half. If we focus on the 11 journals that beganpublication after 1985, only 2 make the upper half of the familiarity list:Accounting Horizons (1987) and the Journal of Management AccountingResearch (1989). The reason for the former has been mentioned; the latteris an AAA journal linked to a section with a fairly large membership. Theother 9 post-1985 journals have yet to achieve high familiarity.15 Only 2,Behavioral Research in Accounting (1989) and the Journal of InformationSystems (1986) have membership constituencies; they are publications ofsmall-membership AAA sections.

Fereeptions of journal qualityAs discussed earlier, respondents assigned each journal a quality rating of1 (most prestigious) through 4 (insignificant) or indicated a lack of suffi-cient familiarity with the journal to assign a quality rating. We summarizethe quality ratings along three dimensions and report the results in Tables3 through 7. The first dimension is reported in Table 3: the percentage ofrespoadents who rated the journal as 1. Those who did not assign a qualityrating to the journal are excluded from Tables 3 through 7; hence, thenumber of respondents varies by journal. Respondents are not given to"grade inflation" in evaluating journals, because only three are rated as 1by more than half of the respondents: The Accounting Review, the Journalof Accounting Research, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics.Indeed, only 10 journals received the highest rating from more than 10percent of the respondents, and 4 journals failed to receive the highest rat-ing from any of the respondents.

'Tks second dimension of quality is reported in Table 4: a compositescore computed by summing each journal's rating times the percentage ofrespondents choosing that rating. Five journals achieved a composite rat-ing below 2.0 (i.e., LOO to 1.99) in al! subgroups: The Accounting Review,the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Accounting andEconomics, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Accounting,Organizations and Society.'^^ Depending on the subgroup, 5 to 8 journalsachieved composite scores below 2.0, and 17 to 25 achieved compositescores below 3.0.

The rankings by the subgroups closely parallel those for the fullgroup. The top five for the financial, managerial, and auditing subgroupsare the same as for the full group (although the order is different). For thetax subgroup, two tax journals, the National Tax Journal and the Joumalof the American Taxation Association, supplant the fourth and fifth jour-nals for the full group.i^ The Pearson correlation coefficients range from0.87 (tax) to 0.98 (financial); further, the quality rankings among the four


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Table 5 presents the results of the third dimension of quality: the per-centage of respondents who rated the journal as either 1 (most presti-gious) or 2 (significant). Depending on the subgroup, 10 to 13 journals arerated as either 1 or 2 by a majority of respondents. Nine journals achievesuch ratings by a majority of respondents in all subsets: the 5 mentionedabove as having composite ratings below 2.0 along with Auditing: AJournal of Practice & Theory; the Journal of the American TaxationAssociation; the Journal of Accounting, Auditing, & Finance; and theJournal of Accounting and Public Policy.

Table 6 summarizes three thresholds of quality. Panel 1 indicates thejournals rated as 1 by 70 percent or more of the respondents familiar withthe journal. The same 3 journals appear for the full group and the foursubgroups, and 2, The Accounting Review and the Joumal of AccountingResearch, were rated as 1 by more than 90 percent of respondents in allfour subgroups. Panel 2 identifies those journals having a composite ratingof less than 2,0. Five to 8 journals achieve this measure, depending on thesubject-area subgroup. In addition to the 3 journals in panel 1 (i.e.. TheAccounting Review, the Joumal of Accounting Research, and the Journalof Accounting and Economics), 2 other journals appear in panel 2 for thefull group and for all subgroups: Contemporary Accounting Research andAccounting, Organizations and Society. The auditing and tax subgroupsinclude Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; the tax subgroup fur-ther includes the National Tax Journal and the Journal of the AmericanTaxation Association Panel 3 identifies the journals rated as either 1 or 2by over 50 percent of the respondents. As discussed above, 10 to 13 jour-nals achieved this measure of quality, and 9 are common to all subgroups(i.e., the 10 journals listed for the full group, with the exception of theNational Tax Journal).

Several implications may be drawn from Tables 3 through 6. First,respondents perceived relatively few journals as being of high quality. Atour lowest threshold in Table 6 (a majority assigning a rating of 1 or 2),fewer than a third of the journals qualified. At the all-respondents level, amajority (24) of the 44 journals had composite scores between 3.0 and 4.0.Second, there is substantial agreement among faculty in the four special-ties as to the top journals in accounting. Of the 10 to 13 highly regardedjournals in the entirety of Table 6, 9 were consensus choices. Moreover,the same 3 journals composed the entire first panel, and 5 journals werecommon to the second

The perceived quality of newer journalsTable 7 presents the perceived quality ratings for the 19 journals that orig-inated after 1980. Included therein is the percentage of respondents ineach of the four quality rating categories, the composite score, and the


percentage of respondents who were familiar with the Journal.Contemporary Accounting Research achieved the highest evaluation ofthese new journals. Even in the company of established journals, it consis-tently ranked in the top 5 for the full group and for 3 of the 4 (taxationexcepted) subgroups. Five of the next 7 journals listed in Table 7 are pub-lications of the American Accounting Association or one of its sections.Again, we observe that the 9 newer journals with composite quality rat-ings less than 3.0 also have familiarity ratings above 50 percent.

LimitatioBs of the stadyThere are a number of inherent limitations to survey studies in general,and to this study ia particular. As mentioned earlier, three threats to thevalidity of opinion surveys in general are response, sample representation,and position biases. We tested for the presence of each of these threepotential validity threats.

Response biasResponse bias occurs if respondents to the survey are different from thenonrespondents in fundamental ways that make it difficult to generalizefrom the results of the respondents to the population. We examined twoaspects of respondents versus nonrespondents to ascertain whether or notsuch fundamental differences existed. First, we examined the ranks (asso-ciate, full) of the respondents versus the nonrespondents and fotind no sig-nifieant differences between them. More specifically, whereas associateswere more likely to respond than fulls, the chi-square statistic is 1.926,with significance level of 0.165. Second, we examined the number of arti-cles published by the respondents versus the nonrespondents, as reflectedin the Accounting Literature Index (Heck, Derstine, and Huefner 1992).We found that the respondents did publish significantly more often thanthe aonrespondents. More specifically, the t value of the difference in themean number of publications of the two groups is 2.66, which has a signifi-cance level of 0.008. More active researchers (who may be presumed to bebest informed on journal quality) were more likely to respond than thoseless involved in research. Morris, Cudd, and Grain (1990) found that fac-ulty members do not exhibit bias toward journals that published their ownworks, so that our sample being "overrepresented" by active researchersshould not impact the relative journal rankings.

Representation biasRepresentation bias comes about if the group we chose to survey is notrepresentative of other groups to which one may wish to generalize. Ourpopulation consisted of senior (associate and full ranks) accounting profes-sors at U.S. universities that have the best 40 MBA programs. As such, itmay not be representative of other populations, such as all accounting pro-fessors at U.S. universities or all accounting professors at all universities.


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Hull and Wright (1990) surveyed accounting faculty at U.S. universitiesand did not confine their population to senior professors or to "top" busi-ness schools. Thus, by comparing our results to theirs, we can ascertainwhether our results are not inconsistent with those based on opinions ofaccounting professors at U.S. institutions. Thirty-three journals were com-mon to both studies. The Spearman rank correlation between the Hull andWright ranking of responses from faculty members in institutions includedin the Accounting Faculty Directory (Hasselback 1987) and our Table 4 forall respondents was 0.87932, which is significant at the 0.0001 level.Moreover, with one exception, the journals common to both studies thatour respondents ranked 1 through 7 were ranked in the top 7 places byHull and Wright.2O The consistency of our results with the broader popula-tion surveyed by Hull and Wright suggests that this particular potentialrepresentation bias does not seriously affect our findings.

Position biasPosition bias arises if the order in which the journals are listed in the sur-vey affects the manner in which the respondent ranks them. To ascertainwhether a position bias impacted our results, we correlated the journalquality for all observations in Table 4 with their position in the survey(alphabetical 1 to 44). The Spearman rank correlation between the journalquality ranking and the order of journal presented on the survey is 0.0405,which is insignificant (p value = 0.79). Position bias does not appear to bea concern in our study.

Other issuesOur measure of familiarity is an indirect one; respondents had the choiceof assigning a quality rating or stating that they were not sufficiently famil-iar with the journal. Schroeder, Payne, and Harris (1986) used a directmeasure of familiarity, asking respondents to assign a rating of 1 through4. To see how the results of otir indirect test compare with the Schroederet al. direct test, we calculated a Spearman rank correlation for the 29journals common to the two studies. The Spearman rank correlation coef-ficient of .76734 is significant at the .0001 level and suggests that our famil-iarity results were not adversely impacted by our choice of measure.

Some respondents to our study classified themselves into more thanone specialty. As noted earlier, we omitted these responses in computingcorrelations between subgroup familiarity and quality ratings. Table 6summarized the quality results at three thresholds. Changes to Table 6 are

, modest when the multiple specialist responses in the subgroups are omit-ted (which drops the aggregation of subgroup membership from 206 to151). Specifically, for the financial subgroup. Accounting, Organizationsand Society would drop from panel 2 to panel 3. For the managerial sub-group, the Journal of Accounting and Economics would drop from panel 1to panel 2, and the Journal of Taxation would replace the Journal of the


American Taxation Association in panel 3. For auditing respondents, boththe Journal of the American Taxation Association and the National TaxJournal would move up from panel 3 to panel 2. For the tax subgroup, theJournal of Accounting and Economics would drop from panel 1 to panel 2,Accounting, Organizations and Society would drop from panel 2 to panel3, and the Accounting Historians Journal would replace the Journal ofAccounting, Auditing & Finance in panel 3. In sum, of the 44 listings forthe subgroups in Table 6, 36 would remain unchanged, 6 would move byone panel, and 2 would be replaced by different journals. We concludeIhat there is minimal effect of including multiple specialists in our qualitytables.

Individuals' responses may be affected by their beitig editors, associ-ate editors, or editorial board members of the journals they are evaluat-ing. Personal agenda items may cause these individuals to rate the journalswith which they are associated higher than otherwise. To ascertainwhether our rankings are impacted by this factor, we ranked the top 10journals (see column 1 of Table 6) after omitting the editors, associate edi-tors, and/or editorial board members of each journal as of the time of oursurvey (spring 1992). The number of respondents omitted varied from alow of 0 (National Tax Journal) to a high of 28 (The Accounting Review).Omitting individuals associated with these journals had very little impacton the results. For all respondents, there is little change in the compositescores and no change in aoy of the three panels of Table 6. We concludethat the results are not impacted by editorial association with the journals.

We defined four categories of specialization: financial, managerial,auditing, and taxation. Other research specialties, such as accounting his-tory, systems, or radical/social accounting, were not included on theexpectatiou that the group size would be too small to yield meaningfulconclusions. Excluding such research specialties may lead to an under-statement of the familiarity with and/or quality of journals to researcherswho emphasize these topics.

Finally, we surveyed faculty at U.S. schools only, introducing a poten-tial national and academic culture bias; we have no evidence that ourresults are representative of accounting academics employed at non-U.S.aniversities.21 Thus, our results need to be interpreted with these caveatsin miod.

SummaryAs the primary vehicles for the dissemination of accounting research,journals play a critical role in the academic world. Journal status—^both interms of widespread familiarity and perceived quality—is important to themaiiy participants in accounting academia. Scholars seek to place theirwork in visible, highly regarded outlets to build their academic reputa-tions. Accouoting administrators support and encourage faculty in tMsregard to build institutional reputations. The review process for promo-


tion and tenure, typically extending through multiple levels of the univer-sity, depends in part on perceptions of journal quality as a surrogate forpeer evaluation of research work. The selection of external reviewers forpromotion and tenure cases can be aided by knowing how faculty at lead-ing schools, particularly those within specialty subgroups, evaluate givenjournals. Editors and others connected with a given journal need feedbackon the status of their journal relative to other journals.

In recent years, the academic accounting profession has becomeincreasingly fractionalized by the creation of numerous special-interestorganizations, and there has been a proliferation of accounting journals.These factors complicate the evaluation of the journal marketplace. Wefocused on the views of a set of faculty who may be deemed opinion lead-ers in accounting academia. We examined the perceptions of 44 journals,19 of which have originated since 1980, and 11 of which have originatedsince 1985.

Among all respondents, 5 journals were nearly universally known(familiarity in excess of 90 percent), and 15 had wide (over 80 percent)recognition. Six of the 19 post-1980 journals have achieved familiarity inexcess of 80 percent; one. Accounting Horizons, achieved familiarity inexcess of 95 percent. Financial, managerial, and auditing factilty exhibitedgenerally the same patterns of familiarity, while tax faculty were conver-sant with a somewhat different set of journals. Auditing faculty tended tohave the broadest range of journal familiarity and tax faculty the narrow-est range.

In journal quality evaluations, there were three consensus top-ratedjournals: The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting Research, andthe Journal of Accounting and Economics. Each was rated as being mostprestigious (1) by more than 80 percent of the full group and by more than70 percent of each subgroup. No other journal had a 1 rating in excess of50 percent by either the full group or by any subgroup. As the dimensionsof high quality were expanded to a composite score of under 2.0 and tothe most prestigious (1) and significant (2) ratings combined, the numberof journals perceived to be of high quality remained modest. Of thepost-1980 journals, only one. Contemporary Accounting Research, madethe second threshold of high quality (composite score below 2.0) amongall respondents. Two other newer journals. Auditing: A Journal of Practice& Theory and the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, made thethird threshold (more than 50 percent of respondents rate the journal as 1or 2).

Several parties have an interest in quality evaluations of jotirnals. Inselecting potential outlets for their research, faculty may use our results asfurther evidence of the quality reputation of journals, as seen by individu-als who may be deemed opinion leaders in U.S. accounting academia.Adtninistrators and university review committees may use these findings asan element in assessing faculty research records. The findings that the num-

Faioiliarity with and Perceived Quality of Accounting Joumais 247

bar of Journals at several thresholds of high quality is modest and thatthere is considerable agreement across subject-area specialties should behelpful; selectivity and consensus lend credence to a claim of high quality.The fractionalization of accounting academia and the proliferation of Jour-nals do not seem to have complicated the assessment of Journal quality.

Selection of external reviewers may be aided by our findings. Thehigh degree of consensus as to top Journals suggests that the reviewer'sspecialty may be relatively unimportant, at least for candidates who havepublished in the leading outlets. However, for candidates with much workla more specialized Journals below the consensus top tiers, the reviewer'sarea of specialty may be more important. At a minimum, familiarity withthe more specialized Journals is seen to vary across specialties. Finally,editors and others connected with Journals gain a market perspective oftlieir product. In particular, some of the newer Journals have achievedconsiderable recognition, either among all respondents or within subspe-cialties.

Endnetes1. Thirteen accounting and tax journals are included as citing journals in the

Social Science Citation Index: Abacus; Accounting, Organizations, and Society;Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory; British Tax Review; the Journal ofAccountancy; the Journal of Accounting and Economics; the Journal ofAccounting and Public Policy; the Journal of Accounting Research; theJournal of Corporate Taxation; the Journal of Taxation; the National TaxJournal; Taxes—The Tax Magazine; and The Accounting Review. Twelve ofthese (all but the British Tax Review) axe included in our study of 44 journals.

2. Howard and Nikolai (1983) excluded the Journal of Accounting andEconomics because it was less than three years old at the time of their survey.Their survey of 551 accounting faculty holding an earned doctorate and teach-ing at a U.S. institution revealed that the Journal of Accounting Research andThe Accounting Review ranked first and second, respectively, of 51 publica-tion outlets. Coe and Weinstock (1983) also excluded the Journal ofAccounting and Economics and found the Journal of Accounting Researchand The Accounting Review to be tied foi first of 15 publication outlets, with amean ranking of 8.5 on a scale of 0 to 9.

3. These results are based on aii degree-granting respondents. The authors alsoprovide separate rankings by respondents from doctoral degree-granting andmaster of tax degree-granting institutions. The former respondents rankedthe top five journals as The Accounting Review, the Journal of AccountingResearch, the National Tax Journal, the Journal of the American TaxationAssociation, and the Journal of Taxation (tied with the Journal of Accountingand Economics). The latter respondents ranked the top five jotirnals as theJournal of Taxation, The Accounting Review, the Tax Law Review, theJournal of the American Taxation Association, and the Journal of AccountingResearch.

4. The rankings differed by groop:

Group 1. The 21 top accounting departments in terms of publications (Brownaad Gardner 1985a).Group 2. Other doctoral-granting accounting programs.Group 3. All remaining AACSB accredited accounting program:?.


Only The Accounting Review, the Joumal of Accounting Research, and theJournal of Accounting and Economics ranked in the top five on the qualitydimension for all three groups. The Accounting Review, the Journal ofAccounting Research, the Journal of Accountancy, and Harvard BusinessReview ranked in the top five on the familiarity dimension for all threegroups.

5. These Journals ranked first, second, fourth, sixth, and eighth in their survey.The nonaccounting Journals, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financialand Quantitative Analysis, and the Journal of Business, ranked third, fifth, andseventh, respectively.

6. The responses aggregated by specialty equal 206; this exceeds the totalresponses of 181 because some individuals indicated more than one area ofspecialty. Specifically, 151 respondents classified themselves into a single cate-gory, 26 chose two categories, and 1 chose three categories; 3 respondents didnot classify themselves into any of the four categories. As discussed subse-quently, the results are qualitatively similar when the 27 multiple-categoryrespondents are omitted.

7. All of Hull and Wright's top 25 Journals (in overall ranking) are included,except those six that are not primarily accounting Journals: the Journal ofFinance, the Joumal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal ofBusiness, Management Science, Harvard Business Review, and DecisionSciences. All 44 Journals, except for Critical Perspectives on Accounting, areincluded in the Accounting Literature Index (1992). Critical Perspectives onAccounting is included in the Accounting Literature Index (Heck, Derstine,and Huefner 1994).

8. The Accounting Literature Index (1992 edition) includes 33 Journals.Corporate Accounting, which ceased publication in 1988, and the Journal ofCost Analysis, which is published on an erratic schedule, are excluded fromour study.

9. These 13 Journals are CMA Magazine, Critical Perspectives on Accounting,EDP Auditor, Internal Auditor, the Joumal of Business Finance &Accounting, the Journal of Corporate Taxation, the Journal of SystemsManagement, the Journal of Taxation, the National Tax Joumal, PublicFinance & Accountancy, Tax Adviser, Tax Law Review, and Taxes— The TaxMagazine.

10. There were 425 blanks attributable to 44 respondents. Of these, 319 (75 per-cent) were attributable to 14 respondents who did not utilize the NF option atall. We considered these as being de facto NF responses and coded them assuch. The remaining 106 (25 percent) of the blanks were attributable to 30respondents who also used the NF option. We considered these as missingdata and omitted these observations (but not these individuals). No respon-dent gave both a quality rating and an NF response for the same Journal.

11. In the only other cited study to consider familiarity, Schroeder et al.'s top fivehad three Journals in common with our findings: The Accounting Review, theJoumal of Accountancy, and the Journal of Accounting Research. Their topfive also included Management Accounting and The CPA Journal (ranked10th and 12th, respectively, in our study). Our top five includes AccountingHorizons, not considered in their study, and the Journal of Accounting andEconomics (ranked 11th among their accounting Journals).

12. Pearson correlation coefficients are presented in the text; Spearman correla-tion coefficients are nearly identical. To avoid positive bias resulting from theinclusion of respondents who classified themselves in more than one category,the 27 multiple specialists are omitted in calculating the correlations.


13. Three AAA Section journals were the most notable exceptions. Auditing: AJournal of Practice & Theory was tied for the most familiar Journal amongauditing faculty but ranked 14th and 15th among managerial and financial fac-ulty. The Journal of the American Taxation Association was tied for 8thamong auditing faculty but ranked 17th and 25th among financial and man-agerial facHlty. The Journal of Management Accounting Research was tied forSth among managerial faculty but ranked 22nd and 30th among financial andauditing faculty.

14. Nevertheless, 6 of its original 19 editorial board members (excluding the editor)listed U.S. academic affiliations, and 5 were at top 40 business schools (Byrne1991). By spring 1992 (the time of our survey), 17 of its 35 editorial board mem-bers had U.S. academic affiliations, and 15 were at top 40 business schools.

15. Because some of these journals have a limited focus, they are unlikely tobecome familiar to all but a small group of researchers.

16. Four of these journals are commoH to the top five of Schroeder et al. (1988)and Hull and Wright (1990). Contemporary Accounting Research was notamong the joiimals considered by either study. Schroeder et ai. found TaxLaw Review (ranking 19th in our study) to rank 4th highest, and Hull andWright ranked Journal of the American Taxation Association 5th (tied for 6thin our study).

17. Among the prior studies cited, only Hull and Wright (1990) considered spe-cialty subgroups. For the financial, managerial, and auditing subgroups, theyhad four journals in common with our top five. We found ContemporaryAccounting Research to rank in the top five for each of these three subgroups.They found Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance among the top five forthe financial and managerial groups, and Journal of the American TaxationAssociation for the auditing group. For the tax subset, our top five containedthe same journals as their study. The Raabe et al. study considered only taxfaculty. There were four journals in common. We include Journal ofAccounting and Economics; they include Journal of Taxation.

18. Similar to the correlation analysis for journal familiarity, the perception ofquality correlations omit the 27 multiple specialists to mitigate positive bias.

19. Because our measures of quality are based only on the responses of individu-als claiming familiarity with the journal, it is possible that a jounial could behighly rated based on a small number of avid supporters. However, high rat-ings based on low familiarity were not a factor. Of the 10 to 13 journalsachieving various measures of high quality in Table 6, all were familiar to atleast 50 percent of the respondents in the specialty subgroups.

20. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory was ranked in the top seven of ourstudy but not in Hull and Wright (1990). The Journal of Accounting, Auditing& Finance was ranked in the top seven of Hull and Wright's study but not inours. These comparative rankings are based on the 33 journals common toboth studies.

21. Nevertheless, at least 10 of the journals in our study appear to be of interestto Canadian accounting academics. Our survey included ail 10 of the journalssxamined by Richardsoo and Williams (1990) in their study of Canadian acad-emic accountants' productivity.

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