International Variations in Perceptions of Accounting Journals

Author(s): Christopher W. Nobes

Source: The Accounting Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 702-705
Published by: American Accounting Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/247464
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THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW
Vol. LX, No. 4
October 1985

International Variations in Perceptions

of Accounting Journals
Christopher W. Nobes

ABSTRACT: The study on perceptions of quality of accounting journals by Howard and

Nikolai [1983] is extended to include respondents from the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.
There are highly significant correlations between the perceptions of faculty in these three
countries. There is also a high correlation with the earlier U.S. study, though the ranking of a
few journals is markedly different.

H OWARD and Nikolai (HN) [19831
reported on the perceived ranking
of the quality of journals by a sam-
ple of U.S. faculty. This paper extends
the survey to three further nations: the
U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.
METHOD
A questionnaire similar to HN's was
used, except that the benchmark journal
was THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW,' given a
score of "100." Thirty-seven journals
were included in the questionnaire, 23
from the HN survey2 and 14 additional
journals that tend to have more recogni-
tion outside the U.S.
The population surveyed was full-time
faculty in permanent posts in universi-
ties.3 There were 571 members of
countries together. One journal (The
Journal of Accounting and Economics)
' It was necessary to use an internationally known
journal, and The Journal of Accountancy (HN's bench-
mark) is not so widely known.
2 Those eliminated included all the 22 lowest-ranked
journals in HN, mostly professional journals, and six
other journals regarded as likely to be less important
internationally.
3The departmental lists of universities were supplied
by the British Accounting Association and the Account-
ing Association of Australia and New Zealand. A further
number of institutions might have been regarded as
"universities" if they were in the U.S.; on the other
hand, most of the present survey population did not have
Ph.D.s, partly due to a different tradition from the U.S.
4The U.K. was the largest group, and the only one for
which the source data already contained information to
enable such a split.
s A very few scores were zero; these were treated as
*"I" for the calculation of geometric means. The rank-
ings are very similar if arithmetic means are used.

the population, all of whom were sent

questionnaires. The usable response rate The author gratefully acknowledges data processing
assistance of Carolyn Girvan, and the useful comments
was 41 percent (see Table 1). This is
of R. H. Parker and W. M. Mclnnes on an earlier draft.
broadly comparable to the U.S. sample
size and number of usable responses. For
Christopher Nobes is Professor of Ac-
the U.K. the responses were split into
counting at the University of Strath-
"accounting" and "finance" groups.4
clyde, Scotland.
RESULTS
Manuscript received November 1984.
Table 2 shows the 37 journals in rank Revision received March 1985.
order by geometric mean5 for the three Accepted March 1985.

702

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 Nobesob0
TABLE
U.S. academic journals
SURVEY SIZE AND RESPONSE RATE
Usable
Population Responses Percent
U.K. 301 123 41
Australia 188 79 42
N.Z. 82 30 36
571 232 41
was specifically mentioned by HN as a
possibly unfortunate omission from their
survey; this is seen to score highly for all
the populations. There is great similarity
between the perceptions of the survey
populations. This is confirmed by high
Spearman rank correlation coefficients;
for example, that between the U.K. and
Australian perceptions is 0.91.6 The cor-
relation coefficient between U.K. (ac-
counting) and U.K. (finance) was 0.95,
suggesting that lack of homogeneity of
faculty in departments may not seriously
affect the international comparisons. All
these coefficients are significant at the
0.1 percent level.
Table 3 shows the rank orders of the 23
journals that were common to the present
survey and to HN. There is a considerable
degree of correlation: the Spearman co-
efficient is 0.75 between HN and the total
of the three countries. The correlations of
any of the four individual populations
with HN are all close to this and are sig-
nificant at the 0. 1 percent level.
However, non-U.S. academics regard
non-U.S. journals more highly than U.S.
academics do; the average rank of non-
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was1 12 for HN
but 7.5 for the other three countries.
Also, for particular journals there are
noticeable differences between HN and
any or all of the non-U.S. populations.
The three journals of substantially
greater appeal to Americans (Harvard
Business Review, Journal of Taxation,
Journal of Accountancy) tend to con-
centrate on technical or professional U.S.
matters. The four journals held in much
higher regard by non-Americans (Abacus,
Accounting and Business Research, In-
ternational Journal of Accounting, Ac-
counting Historians Journal) are all aca-
demic journals, but ones that do not
specialize in "empirical" or mathemati-
cally-based research; Abacus and Ac-
counting and Business Research contain
many financial reporting/law articles
which would be of little importance in the
different institutional context of the
U.S., and all four journals contain his-
tory and international articles.
SUMMARY
There is a very high correlation be-
tween the perceptions of accounting aca-
demicians in the U.K., Australia, and
New Zealand. There is a lower, but still
highly significant, correlation between
perceptions in these countries and those
reported for the U.S. by HN. However, a
few journals stand out as being perceived
differently in the U.S. compared to the
other countries.
6 Nearly half the squared differences in ranks in this
case were caused by different perceptions of one journal:
The British Tax Review.
704 The Accounting Review, October 1985

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 Nobes 705

TABLE
COMPARATIVE RANK ORDERS OF GEOMETRIC MEANS

U.K. Total
HN (Accounting) (3 Countries)

JAR 1 2 2
AR 2 3 3
JF 3 1 1
JFQA 4 4 4
JB 5 9 5
HBR 6 10 12
DS 7 11 11
AOS* 8 5 6
JBFA* 9 7 9
JTt 10 19 21
JAt 11 17 17
FAJt 12 15 15
AB* 13 8 8
JAAF 14 13 10
JBR 15 16 14
NTJt 16 18 20
MAt 17 21 19
ABR* 18 6 7
IJA 19 12 13
CPAJt 20 23 23
IAt 21 20 18
AC*t 22 22 22
AHJ 23 14 16

* Non-U.S. journal
t Tax or professional journal

REFERENCE

Howard, T. P. and L. A. Nikolai, "Attitude Measurement and Perceptions of Accounting Faculty

Publication Outlets," THE ACCOUNTING REViEw (October 1983), pp. 765-776.

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