Food for Thought on the ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide

Abstract

This paper discusses issues relating to the use of the Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide within UK business schools. It also looks at several specific issues raised by the Chair of the British Accounting Association/British Accounting and Finance Association regarding the ratings for top international journals, and for accounting education and accounting history journals. The increasing use of this guide by business school deans/heads as a tool for staffing and research resource allocation has significant implications both for individuals and specialist areas of research.

Keywords:

• Journal quality
• journal ratings
• accounting education
• accounting history
• Association of Business Schools

Notes

The British Accounting Association (BAA) has since been renamed the British Accounting and Finance Association (BAFA), but the former title is retained throughout the main text of this paper because this was how the organization was identified in the letter to the ABS editors, dated 19 April 2010.

Recently, Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft (2009) have suggested a possible alternative citation measure based on data collected from Google Scholar, which is then employed in a g-index measure.

These individual school ratings appeared in the 2007–2009 editions of the ABS journal quality guide.

See Australian Business Deans Council: http://www.abdc.edu.au/

The exclusion of Accounting, Organizations and Society from the UTD list likely reflects the greater fixation with economics-based positivist/functionalist research in leading US institutions, as noted by Williams, Jenkins and Ingraham (2005), Hopwood (2008a,b), and Zeff (see Dyckman and Uecker, 2011, p. 83).

Website: http://www.harzing.com

With regard to the last of these points, the following journals found themselves excluded between the 2009 and 2010 editions of the ABS guide: Australian Accounting Review, Asia Pacific Journal of Accounting and Economics, Asian Review of Accounting, Journal of Forensic Accounting, and Review of Accounting and Finance.

Chan, Chan, Seow and Tam (2009) report that a number of professionally-oriented journals, including Accountancy, are well cited in US Ph.D. dissertations.

These revisions are not obvious from the 2010 edition of the ABS guide, which does not accurately record the 2009 scores, but can be identified by examining the 2009 guide and the 2010 guide side-by-side.

Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal; Critical Perspectives on Accounting; International Journal of Accounting; Journal of Accounting Auditing and Finance; Journal of Accounting Literature and Management Accounting Research.

These are not reported for the previous analysis of top international journals since there is no significant disagreement among the six schools regarding the ‘4’ ratings for these accounting journals.