Anatomy of a Journal: A Reflection on the Evolution of Academic Accounting in Canada 1984-2010

The most influential journals in academic accounting

Abstract: Autoethnography is prominent in qualitative social science research but is relatively less common in accounting research, though its influence is beginning to grow as researchers recognize this rich and innovative methodological approach. Autoethnography enables the researcher themselves to form a subject of lived inquiry within the social context of accounting and its environs. For qualitative accounting researchers this offers new forms of knowing and understanding experience, emotion and identity in the social context of the accounting profession or accounting academia, or in relation to the social construction of accounting itself. This chapter outlines what autoethnography is as both a research process and a product of research; explores the ontological, epistemological and methodological issues arising from such an approach; discusses the various forms that autoethnography takes; outlines ways of writing autoethnography; illustrates how it has been used in contemporary accounting research; discusses some of the dilemmas and tensions involved; and evaluates its future possibilities in accounting research.

The role of gender is an important issue in the accounting field, both in practice and in higher education. This study provides a longitudinal analysis of female authorship of articles published in six major accounting journals, three academic journals and three professional journals: The Accounting Review , Contemporary Accounting Research , Journal of Accounting Research , The CPA Journal , the Journal of Accountancy, and Strategic Finance . Articles are classified into 11 different research categories and comparisons of authorship by gender are made across these categories. Results reveal that female academicians are making a significantly greater contribution to accounting research than in the past, both in academic and professional journals, reflecting their increasing representation and acceptance among accounting academics. This study makes a unique contribution by its analysis regarding the factors of gender, research topic area, and practice versus academic journals. The study extends prior gender publication research by examining how female researchers' performance has changed relative to that of males over time.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 135 tions of what he is saying for the student of the history of design, of manufacturing, of product innovation, and of technological culture generally are considerable. Robert Friedel Dr. Friedel teaches the history of technology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book was a catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition “A Material World.” Journal of Design History. Vol. 1, nos. 1—4. Edited by Christopher Bailey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. 258; illustra­ tions, notes. Paper. Annual subscription (quarterly issue): £35.00 United Kingdom; $72.00 North America; £45.00 elsewhere. As anyone who is on the Greybooks mailing list of publications in art and design can testify, there is certainly no dearth of new titles or reissued old titles in topics related to design history. Given the propensity for authors to illustrate specific applications (or, less often, discuss conceptual approaches) between hard covers, it is surprising that so few journals exist in this area. This is not to say that the subject goes untreated in existingjournals. A number of them, Technology and Culture included, deal with issues relevant to design history. One thinks especially of Design Quarterly, issued at an economical $22.00 a year by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which since 1946 has frequently integrated design his­ tory into its discussions; and the more recent (1984— ) Design Issues: A Journal of History, Theory and Criticism, published by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Coverage is uneven, however, and readers in this area have generally had to comb the literatures of a number of fields: technology, material culture, anthropology, art, architecture, the dec­ orative arts, graphics, interior design, and industrial design. The search leads to the acquisition of a wide variety of interesting infor­ mation, but it is also time-consuming. For this reason, any journal promising to focus on this amorphous topic would be welcome. In the case of the publication here reviewed, the welcome is especially warm. Its sponsoring organization, the Design History Society, based in Great Britain and now slightly over a decade old, has proved its worth by organizing a number of ground-breaking confer­ ences and colloquia in this developing held. Its editorial and advisory boards are staffed by scholars of international reputation. And its concept of design as a socioeconomic activity promises to unify potentially sectarian disciplines within design and to provide scholars working in related fields with a new forum for research. Only its subscription price (high, and by the nature of things bound to become higher still) is unwelcome. 136 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE For the money, the first-year subscriber to this new journal received two single issues and a double issue, altogether fourteen articles and more than twenty book reviews. The emphasis is uniformly on events, movements, and designers of the postindustrial age in Western Europe; but as they make clear in their policy statement, the editors do “seek to encourage contributions on design in pre-industrial periods and non-European societies, as well as on hitherto neglected or unfamiliar areas and topics.” In general, the articles in the first two issues explore the literature and theories of design history, including an overview of the discipline in America by Victor Margolin (pp. 5172 ) and a discussion by Sean Cubitt of semiotics as a method of interpretation (pp. 127-39). The double issue, the first of many “ ‘special’ issues devoted to particular areas, periods or themes” announced by the editors, contains six articles focusing on 20th-century Germany. Subthemes are design education (particularly at the Bauhaus and HfG Ulm) and the relationship between politics and design, between politics and education, and between education and the marketplace. Technology and Culture readers might be especially interested in “The Politics of German Railway Design” by Christopher Harvie (pp. 235—47). Two articles—Nicolas Bullock’s “ ‘First the Kitchen. . . ’ ” (pp. 177-92) and Gunter Berghaus’s “Girlkultur” (pp. 193-219)—may appeal to (or appall) those in women’s studies. Many of the articles are illustrated, but in general the grainy black-and-white photographs add little to the text. Exceptions are those accompanying Katalin Kerserti’s article on...

Information technology plays a critical role in modern business, especially regarding the accounting function. Thus, one might expect that information technology and accounting systems would be a major component of accounting research. This study seeks to answer the questions: To what extent does the accounting literature include technology and systems research, and is technology and systems research adequately addressed in the accounting literature? To answer these questions, this study examines the proportion of technology and systems articles in seven top-ranked accounting journals, four academic and three professional. Journals examined include: The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accountancy, CPA Journal, and Strategic Finance (formerly Management Accounting). The findings indicate that while there has been a dramatic increase in the proportion of systems articles published in the professional journals, there were very, very few technology and systems articles published in the academic journals. This might suggest a lack of appropriate attention by academic accounting journals to this important area. Consequently, accounting information systems (AIS) professors who are doing research in systems have a disadvantage in publishing research in top-ranked academic journals. This may result in adverse career consequences for AIS professors if they are expected to publish in these particular academic journals. Further, lack of systems research published in academic journals is detrimental to the perceived and actual relevance of these journals, as technology and systems issues are vitally important to the accounting profession.

Branch campuses, twinning arrangements, and other manifestations of cross-border higher education are booming. Universities in Europe, Australasia, and North America see a huge market by offering their degrees in other countries. At the same time, Singapore and several of the states in the Arabian Gulf have identified themselves as educational centers and are attracting international higher education providers. In the Gulf, there is even competition for attracting overseas universities. China has opened its doors to foreign institutions, and India is moving in this direction. While there are no accurate numbers, more than 500 branch campuses exist worldwide—plus thousands of “twinned” programs. In addition, the phenomenon of the “American University of . . .” manifests another trend in crossborder higher education. There are a dozen or more such universities, some of which have a direct link with a US university while many simply use the name “American” and offer a US-style curriculum in English in a non-US setting. If the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) becomes part of the structure of international academic arrangements, the numbers of all kinds of cross-border institutions will increase even faster. One significant problem exists with these arrangements. Who is teaching the students at these branch campuses? What does a degree from a university signify if the teaching staff are not from the university offering the degree? To use the McDonald's analogy—is the meal (degree) a true McDonald's hamburger if only the recipe (the curriculum) comes from McDonalds. The rest of the process—the ingredients (facilities) and the cooks (professors)—are local, rather than from the sponsoring institution. Should a university in the United Kingdom (or another country) claim to offer a degree overseas if only the curriculum is from the sponsoring school, perhaps along with an element of quality control? With little data indicating the proportion of faculty members from the home universities teaching at branch or twinning campuses, anecdotal evidence shows that the numbers are small and most of the teaching is carried out by professors who are not faculty from the sponsoring institution. Even when they do come from the home university, faculty teaching at branch or twinned campuses are generally not the “star” research-active professors. It is not known if some of the recent high-prestige universities that have entered the branch campus business—the University of Chicago, the Cornell University Medical School, the University of Nottingham, and others—have a different profile than the many more average institutions thus far engaged.

Psychopathy is characterized by deficits of conscience and empathy, and is measurable in nonclinical populations. It is one of the “Dark Triad” of personality variables, but has received minimal attention in accounting literature, despite obvious implications for fraud. In the practice of empirical research, two sides of the “Fraud Triangle,” motive and opportunity, are in place, awaiting only rationalization. For one high on the psychopathy scale, rationalization of fraud is easy or moot. Widespread fraud exists in scientific research, and studies indicate that accounting is not exempt. I hypothesize and find a positive effect of psychopathy on article publication count in leading accounting journals, mediated by individuals' greater acceptance of unethical acts in research and publication. Participants are 546 North American accounting faculty who have published in accounting research journals, who are lower on the psychopathy scale than previous samples from other populations. Policy and research implications are discussed.

In this essay I reflect on my career in academic accounting and explore what has remained the same and what has changed over that time. I examine the people who enter academic accounting, the content of graduate studies, and the contents of the American Accounting Association's premier journal, all of which have changed. I consider how our research remains constrained by boundaries and some statistical approaches that we impose on it. I briefly discuss two significant changes facing students—the major impact of technology on their lives and the rapidly increasing cost of education. I note what I believe are some unsustainable features of our profession and end with a call to revisit our purpose—individually and as a profession.

This study uses the weightings of accounting journal quality derived by Howard and Nikolai (HN, 1983) to produce a ranked list of the publishing contribution of the twenty‐five top non‐U.S. institutions for the ten‐year period 1977–86. A data base was created of all the contributions by non‐U.S. academics to the ten academic accounting and finance journals ranked highest in the HN study. The results of the analyses of this data base indicate: (a) the contribution of non‐U.S. countries to the accounting and finance literature; (b) the proportion of publications accounted for by the top twenty‐five non‐U.S. institutions; and (c) a ranking of the contributions of the top twenty‐five non‐U.S. institutions.

A little over 20 years ago, an editor from SAGE contacted several people to ask if the publisher should start a new evaluation journal located in London. Some said, no, there were too many evaluation journals already. I said, yes, we could use another journal, depending on what it did. The existing journals were mostly North American. They were good journals, but they had a particular style and sense of content that excluded many ideas. I had spent time in Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Spain. It seemed to me that some interesting evaluation ideas in those places were unlikely to be published in the existing journals. After 20 years of Evaluation, I believe my assessment was correct. Many quality articles would not have been published. Based on this criterion, the journal has been highly successful. A second beneficial outcome has been that the journal has led to more interdisciplinary and international exchanges. Many authors would have published solely in the journals of their home disciplines, countries, and languages. Mixing ideas can lead to new combinations, some of which may be useful. A third positive outcome has been the furtherance of on-going debates. These debates can (sometimes) clarify issues. I attribute this last feature to an active editor who is unafraid of controversy. To illustrate these claims, I’ll discuss two streams of ideas that would not have received as much attention without the journal. One stream is from Britain and the other from Sweden. I present these ideas drawing on journal history as well as personal reflections.

Journal Article Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950. Edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ix plus 369pp.) Get access Thomas M. Adams Thomas M. Adams Washington, D.C. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 32, Issue 2, Winter 1998, Pages 474–478, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/32.2.474 Published: 01 December 1998

Background The patient party is responsible for producing expert evidence to prove the negligence of a doctor, which becomes difficult due to lack of doctor's willingness to testify against other doctors. Impact factor (IF) is a surrogate to compare the quality of medical journals, which can be divided into low IF (< 10) and high IF (> 10). We aim to analyze various medical negligence cases where the medical journal was cited in court judgments on the parameters like court's verdict, IF of journals cited, compensation awarded, etc. Methods This is a cross-sectional descriptive analysis. Judgments were accessed from www.scconline.com . IF was accessed from Clarivate Analytics 2019 ratings. Judgments having the word "Medical" AND "Negligence" in which either patient or doctor cited any journal data as evidence were included. The ci-square test was used as test of significance. Results Twenty-six judgments met the inclusion criteria, with seven verdicts in favor of doctor (27%). The median IF was 2.455 with the New England Journal of Medicine having the highest IF (70.67). The median compensation awarded was 7.5 lakhs. The verdict of the court (doctor's win or loss) was not dependent on the IF (low IF or High IF) of the journal (chi-square = 0.16, p = 0.68). Conclusion All types of courts handling medical negligence, viz., criminal court, consumer/civil court, writ court, and medical councils, accept medical journal research papers even as the sole evidence in the case of medical negligence. Most of the journals cited were low IF journals.

Since our first issue in 1977, with founding editor Michael Harloe, IJURR has been at the forefront of critical urban debates. The year 2015 marks an important moment for the journal since we stand at a crossroads between an increasingly corporate publishing environment, in which many journals are becoming online only, their academic content trapped behind expensive electronic pay walls, and an alternative pathway towards a defence of the modern journal as a printed publication, affordable and accessible to a wide range of readers. Many libraries, for example, especially from the global South, continue to rely on print-only subscriptions. At our most recent editorial board meeting held in Mexico City we had a wide-ranging discussion about the future of academic publishing and reaffirmed our commitment to IJURR as a high-quality academic journal available in both print and online formats. The cornerstone of our defence of IJURR in an increasingly challenging publishing environment is our comprehensive redesign. This has been developed over the last two years in collaboration with the Austrian designer Paulus M. Dreibholz, who has extensive experience with cutting-edge architectural and cultural publications, across a variety of different formats. As part of the IJURR redesign each article will work effectively either as an individual electronic document or as a printed version contained within a specific journal issue. The dual approach extends to precise details of the font, layout and pagination. Given the intense pressures on space we have had to find a solution that does not significantly affect our annual page range for the journal. A key element of the redesign has involved changing the existing typefaces. We have replaced the Times New Roman typeface, which is amongst the least distinctive available, with the clearer and more contemporary Mercury (1997), developed by the New York based typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler. For the headings, captions and block quotes, which had been set in Interstate (used for American road signage), we have switched to Avenir Next (2007), a typeface developed by Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, which adds greater versatility between print and digital formats than Frutiger's original Avenir (1988) but retains key elements of geometric sans-serif typefaces such as Erbar (1922) and Futura (1927). With our new look we are aiming to make IJURR more distinctive, more readable, and also more closely engaged with cutting-edge developments in design and publishing, including the necessity to connect with wider audiences such as practitioners and urbanists outside the academy. Our redesign also marks a more serious engagement with the use of visual materials ranging from architectural sketches, film stills and photographs to various explanatory figures and tables. We are not only interested in the quality and legibility of these materials, both for print and online readers, but also their precise role in the context of key urban debates. Additionally, each issue of the journal will feature three images on the cover, connected to the articles, but also providing an opportunity to reflect on broader themes in urban culture. We also intend to use this ‘gallery space' to signal the distinctiveness of key debates or symposia. In parallel with changes to the journal we have also worked with the German web designer Corinna Reetz to revamp our website: gone is the clutter and garish maroon banner. In its place we hope that readers will find the site clearer and more navigable. We will be making greater use of our website in future to enable complementary commentaries and shorter interventions to accompany themes developed within the journal itself but also to allow faster interaction with contemporary debates of potential interest to our readers. As part of our commitment to improving IJURR we have also upgraded the paper quality for the printed journal––contrary to recent publishing trends––to ensure that the journal is attractive, readable, and earns its place on our bookshelves. We are keen that the journal should be available for sale in individual bookshops, alongside other critical journals, and we have negotiated a special single-issue price to facilitate this way of reaching wider readerships. We are also introducing a choice of referencing systems between the Chicago (footnote) and Harvard (in-text citation) models to reflect our commitment towards widening the range of disciplines we wish to feature in these pages: we hope that scholars from anthropology, history, science and technology studies (STS) and other disciplines will consider IJURR as a suitable outlet for innovative work that has hitherto been largely published elsewhere. This flexibility is important because it enables us to handle a wider range of data sources, methodological approaches and styles of writing: we are interested in countering the creeping uniformity of academic scholarship and the tendency towards highly formulaic modes of exposition. Another important area of change in academic publishing that affects IJURR directly is the introduction of ‘open access publishing'. This change is being driven mainly by demands that publications derived from publicly funded research activity should be freely available in digital format. At present, there are two ‘open access' options available: ‘green' and ‘gold'. Under ‘green open access', authors can make the peer-reviewed version of their article (i.e. the accepted version before copy editing and formatting) openly available in institutional and not-for-profit repositories after a set embargo period. Under ‘gold open access', authors who have institutional funds available to pay the so-called ‘Article Publication Charge' can make the published version of their article openly available immediately upon publication. IJURR fully embraces the move to green open access. However, our editorial board has raised significant concerns that the payment of exorbitant fees for gold open access is an integral part of the neoliberal drift in higher education and academic publishing. It is also discriminatory, since it will disproportionately benefit scholars from wealthier institutions in the global North with access to sources of research funding and institutions that can support (and indeed demand) the payment of gold open access fees. Nevertheless, we had to weigh our deep concern about gold open access against the need to find a solution that will not deter publicly funded research from being published in IJURR. Within this complicated publishing terrain we decided to offer green open access to all our authors, and gold open access to those authors who have to comply with gold open access requirements posed by their institutions or research funding bodies. At the same time, we actively explore ways in which gold open access fees can be redistributed to benefit authors from different institutional and geographical settings, in consultation with the charitable wing of our activities, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. In recognition that academic publishing, along with its wider institutional and public policy context, is in a state of flux at present we shall regularly review these developments to try and mitigate some of the more iniquitous effects. We are conscious that IJURR is embedded in an asymmetrical environment but do not wish to exacerbate these inequalities further. One additional question linked to the open access debate, is the way in which open access content can be handled in the print version of the journal. As noted earlier, we remain committed to retaining a high quality well-designed print journal, in an era in which commercial and technical advances push for the full ‘digitalization' of academic publications. But what does ‘being open access' mean to subscribers of the print only version of the journal, or to readers who do not have access to digital formats? Although it hinges upon addressing complex legal and institutional issues, we are committed to continue exploring ways for offering equal opportunities for open access to authors and readers alike independently of their geographic location or institutional setting. The significant increase in the quantity of submissions, combined with the increase in quality of papers we receive is a welcome development. Although in 2013 and 2014 we published almost twice our normal content in order to accommodate the increasing number of excellent papers we received, we are now also very close to accepting just 10% of articles submitted. This means we publish only articles that are judged to be truly exceptional in terms of empirical, methodological or conceptual originality and critical insight. What is also important to note, however, is that the journal's high quality is the result of the collective effort and labour put into it not only by authors, editors, and the editorial board and office, but also by our referees, who offer critical comments to improve papers. IJURR is one of the few journals that engage referees at every stage of the reviewing process by communicating all comments and editorial decisions to referees as well as authors. This is made possible thanks to the outstanding support offered by Mel Goodsell and Angela Yeap, under the guidance of Terry McBride, our managing editor. By sharing the anonymized version of the decision letter we send to authors with our international body of referees, we hope to foster the growth of an international community of critical scholars who are sometimes trained in different reviewing traditions. As they can see the comments written by their peers, our reviewers can engage in an international dialogue. Problems of urban and regional development are of growing visibility on a world scale, in rich and poor, socialist and capitalist countries alike. Often … they directly derive from processes which operate on an international level. This journal will compare and contrast such problems as they occur in widely differing situations and social systems. International dialogue has been our mission since the very beginning, a dialogue between scholars from various disciplines and origins, and a dialogue between scholars and activists (and they are oftentimes the same people). In 1998, the editors published a statement reflecting on how IJURR developed with regards to its original objectives. They wrote: ‘Despite the recurrent taste for simple universal models (which can be seen as an indirect form of intellectual domination), we have respected the diversity of urban experience and the usefulness of comparative analysis to enable understanding of the more familiar by contrast to the less familiar'. In 2009, the editors highlighted that international dialogue was more and more reflected in the composition of the editorial board, as well as in the range of articles published in the journal. Moreover, they note that technological changes now allow the journal to be accessible around the world. But, as they note, ‘internationalization is surely above all about acknowledging that theories derived from the experiences of North-West Europe and North America may not be universally applicable, and that those regions may be exceptional from a global perspective. Internationalization is thus a process of reconsidering and challenging theory on a range of levels'. Over the years, the very meaning of IJURR's international mission has changed because the world has profoundly changed. If the language we use to speak of the world has evolved, we remain stuck in dichotomies, despite many calls to break them down. Our efforts in the last decade have been placed on fostering scholarship that attempts to do away with these capitalist/socialist, first world/third world, developed/under-developed, core/periphery, north/south dichotomies in innovative ways. This has meant opening our pages to new epistemological traditions produced outside Europe and North America and in the new transdisciplinary frontiers of social knowledge production. The challenges are great because of language barriers and the continued dominance of English-speaking ways of writing papers and conducting research, which transpires in the reviews we receive. But the journal pursues its work towards internationalization by, for instance, relying on more and more reviewers from outside of Europe and North America. We have recently begun to organize IJURR lectures in other languages than English. The first of such, held in Mexico City in October 2014, will be available online shortly.

This study evaluated the distribution of research on the use of large language models (LLMs) in ophthalmology through a bibliographic analysis of articles retrieved from PubMed through November 2024. Studies were categorized into four main areas of LLM application: clinical decision-making (further divided according to subspecialties), education, patient interactions, and miscellaneous applications. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the distribution of studies by ophthalmic subspecialty, geographical region, journal quality, and author characteristics, including gender and scholarly impact (h-index and i10-index). The findings revealed that clinical decision-making was the most common application (43.7%), with the majority of studies in this subgroup focusing on the retina (39.5%). Geographically, most of the research originated from North America (48.3%), followed by Asia (29.9%) and Europe (20.7%). Most studies were published in high-impact journals (Q1 journals: 74.7%), particularly for those related to clinical decision-making in retina (80.0%), glaucoma (100%), and multiple subspecialties (87.5%). Gender disparities were evident across all author roles, with female authors accounting for only 29.9% of first authors, 25.3% of last authors, and 26.4% of corresponding authors. The results suggest a need for greater diversity in terms of gender and geographic representation in LLM research in ophthalmology to promote inclusive progress in the field.

The history of the selection of herbicide resistant populations in North America dates back to 1962 with the report of a Daucus carota population that was resistant to 2,4-D along a Canadian roadside. However, this resistant population did not spread nor has resistance to auxin type herbicide become a major problem. The discovery of triazine resistant Senecio vulgaris in Washington State in 1968 was the beginning of a more widespread problem. Triazine resistance has spread throughout the maize producing area of North America primarily where there is little crop rotation and/or herbicide combinations. In 1973 dinitroaniline resistant Eleusine indica populations were reported in cotton producing areas of the southeastern U. S. As in the case of triazine resistance, dinitroaniline resistance arose where the same herbicides were used with little or no use of other modes of action. In the 1980’s resistance to ACCase inhibitors and the ALS inhibitors in Canada and the U. S. was uncovered. In the case of the ALS inhibitors, this resistance was discovered within 5 years after introduction of the sulfonylureas. In most, if not all, instances of resistance, the farmers used the same mode of action herbicides on the same piece of land over an extended period of time with no other methods or herbicides used for weed control. In the 1990’s resistance to some of the older herbicides, such as triallate and propanil, as well as the newer, more potent herbicides, began to appear. Today resistant populations to many different classes of herbicides can be found throughout North America. Several different academic and industrial groups have been established and are working to educate growers and others on weed management techniques which will minimize the selection of herbicide resistant populations as well as manage resistant populations after they are selected.