Exploring Governmental Accounting Research in Top 59 Accounting Journals: A Text Mining Study

• In Event: Publications and Pedagogy

Abstract

As the sub-discipline of accounting, governmental accounting lags while other sub-disciplines experience unprecedented growth rate. Even though there have been discussions on the potential reasons for lack of attention among scholars and students towards governmental accounting, there has not been a study that provides an encompassing historical perspective on governmental accounting by using empirical evidence. This study addresses this gap by filtering 526 governmental accounting related references from 54,367 references of A*, A, and B accounting journals, ranking based on Australian Business Council Dean’s list of 2016. Text mining analyses of the abstract of 526 publications on governmental accounting revealed five topics of research including 1) municipal and local governments, 2) auditing and public accounting, 3) accounting profession & education, 4) accounting standards, and 5) federal accounting, educational cases and women in public accounting. Besides revealing the specific research topics, this study also confirmed the small share (1%) of governmental accounting within the top 59 accounting journals. The stakeholders of governmental accounting can utilize the results of this study to develop future agendas for research and education.

Authors

• Ferhat D Zengul, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Nurettin Oner, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Jonathan H Patterson, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Jacqueline Reck, University of South Florida