Is It a Home Run? Measuring Relative Citation Rates in Accounting Research

Abstract

We propose a new set of citation metrics for evaluating the relative impact of scholarly research in accounting. Our metrics are based on current practices in bibliometrics and normalize citations by both field (accounting) and year of publication. We show that our normalized citation metrics dominate other commonly used metrics in accounting when predicting the long-term citation impact of recently published research. We conduct our analysis using citations from the Social Science Citation Index for the top six general interest accounting journals. More generally, our metrics can be readily constructed using any citation database and for any subfield of accounting. The metrics simply require the total citation counts for a benchmark set of papers published in the same calendar year. The use of these metrics should enable more informed performance evaluations of junior accounting researchers.

Keywords: accounting research, research impact, citation metrics

JEL Classification: M40, M49