An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by the Accounting Review, 1926–2005

In her presidential message to the American Accounting Association (AAA) in August 2005, Judy Rayburn discussed the issue of the relatively low citation rate for accounting research compared to finance, management, and marketing. Rayburn concluded that accounting's low citation rate was due to a lack of diversity in topics and research methods. In this paper, we provide a review of the AAA's flagship journal, The Accounting Review (TAR), following its 80 years of publication, and describe why some recent AAA leaders believe that significant changes should be made to the journal's publication and editorial policies. At issue is whether scholarly accounting research is overly focused on mathematical analysis and empirical research, or “accountics” as it has sometimes been called, at the expense of research that benefits the general practice of accountancy and discovery research on more interesting topics. We conclude from our review of TAR that after mostly publishing research about accounting practices for the first 40 years, a sweeping change in editorial policy occurred in the 1960s and 1970s that narrowly defined scholarly research in accounting as that which employs accountics.