Does Hierarchy Exist Among the Refereed Accounting Journals?

Abstract

The extent of literature revealed an uneven playing field in publishing in refereed business Journals. To test if this was also true for accounting Journals, we evaluated the relative frequency of articles published in top accounting Journals, and they too exhibited bias in their article selection. Chi-Square tests showed significant differences on three null hypotheses while Goodman Kruskal tau tests show refereed accounting Journals predict (p<.O1) an institution's Carnegie classification, AACSB accreditation, and that the number of coauthors appearing on a single publication influenced where it was published. Similar to business Journals, accounting Journals appear to be biased in their selection of articles based on an institution's class.

Keywords: Ethical conduct; relative fiequency; refereed Journals; peer reviewer bias