Co-authorship in accounting history: advantages and pitfalls

Abstract

Relatively little has been written about co-authorship in accounting and even less specific to accounting history. This paper endeavours to track co-authorship patterns in the discipline, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The three specialist accounting history journals provide the data to render quantitative judgements, whilst a survey of accounting history scholars has generated information on how co-authorship is perceived in the field, particularly its benefits and pitfalls. A matching technique is used to gauge whether patterns in accounting history are similar to those within the broader accounting discipline. Consideration will also be given to comparisons of how co-authorship is viewed by US and non-US academicians.

Keywords:

• accounting history
• co-authorship
• co-authorship quantitatively and qualitatively
• US and non-US co-authorship surveys

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for funding support from KPMG and the Wasmer Fellowship at John Carroll University, and to participants at the19th annual Accounting, Business & Financial History Conference, Cardiff, September 2007. We also wish to thank the editors and reviewers of ABFH who bore with us during the review process.

Notes

Carmona (2006) also identified 11 books as influential works, only two of which were co-authored. The latest of these influential books was published in 1990, suggesting that books as the medium for the presentation of research results is falling into disfavour and that book co-authorship was fairly rare at the best of times. A conceivable explanation for this pattern might be the slowness to market of books in these days when accreditation and governmental rankings have become measures of institutional quality and funding.

Selection for inclusion in the two anthologies was determined only after consultation with prominent members of the accounting history academic community, bounded by constraints. Inclusion in the Edwards collection was made based upon a predetermined list of topics, some of which were dropped if they proved not to fit the project well or if there was an insufficiency of quality materials available. The Fleischman volumes were constrained by an over-arching theme that debate and discourse were to underlie the themes and articles selected. Also, the publisher introduced the stipulation that the major journals that published accounting history were to be represented in the collection.

The authors are grateful to Professor John Richard Edwards of the University of Cardiff for his insights on the RAE.

The unfair difficulties some Continental scholars encounter trying to publish in mainstream accounting history journals has been strongly protested by Salvador Carmona and Luca Zan (Carmona 2004; Carmona and Zan 2002; Zan 2004), amongst others.

However, joint venturing by scholars representing contending paradigms can be the most frustrating of experiences if the participants go into the project with uncooperative attitudes. Academicians who are so committed to their worldviews as to be doctrinaire or intransigent should either remain sole authors or should work only with others who see eye-to-eye with them.

The level of co-authorship in a particular time span in the accounting history journals is significantly different statistically from that in the same time period for the matched set of accounting journals in all reported periods at a p<.05 level.

The Accounting Historians Journal in its current format began publication in 1974.

The authors are grateful to Michael Jones and John Richard Edwards for suggesting this matching structure to us.

For both Accounting and Business Research and the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, the period for which data is reported was selected to mirror that reported for the corresponding history journal. Accounting and Business Research was first published in 1971 and the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal began in 1988.

Tables 2 and 3 correctly use the caption country/region to accommodate Australia/New Zealand (ANZ) but, for brevity, the term country is used elsewhere in the paper.

Of course, there are a number of institutions around the world with accounting departments staffed by a substantial number of faculty members who do historical research. Rather than risk omitting some of these bastions of accounting history, we refrain from identifying any of them specifically.

Responses were received from authors in 16 additional countries, each with five or fewer respondents. Six respondents chose not to indicate their country affiliation.

In Table 5, the rationales for co-authorship ranked among the top ten and bottom seven were identical for the total sample and the subsample of respondents affiliated with institutions in non-English speaking countries. The only rationale that was ranked substantially differently between the two samples was ‘increase likelihood of publication by inclusion of prestigious coauthor’ which was ranked 27th in the total sample results and 17th for the subsample.