Examining accounting departments’ rankings of the quality of accounting journals

Given the importance of research productivity to the tenure, promotion, merit raise processes and growth of the cognitive foundation of the accounting discipline, developing valid criteria for assessing the quality of accounting journals seems indispensable. While many studies have examined the quality of accounting and related journals, they relied mainly on surveys of the perceptions of faculty, accounting program chairs or deans. No study has yet ascertained the rankings that accounting departments actually use in evaluating journal quality. Moreover, few studies that examine journal quality have been published in the last decade. With the American Accounting Association's support and using a survey of accounting programs, we examine how accounting programs actually assess the quality of accounting journals. We document the rankings used by both doctoral-granting and non-doctoral-granting accounting programs, and confirm the existence of an elite set of journals whose rankings are invariant to school type, faculty size, resource base or mission. We interpret this as evidence of the influence of a select group of elite accounting programs in defining the parameters of value in accounting scholarship, which we observe can be detrimental to the scholarship of application, integration and teaching in accounting. Our results offer insight into why accounting departments use (or do not use) journal rankings and presents detailed results that can help develop reasonable criteria for assessing research and scholarship.