AAA Spark Meeting of Regions

A Textual Analysis of Academic Elite and Practitioner Journals: Is Accounting's Research-Practice Gap Real or Perceived?

• In Event: Sustainability

Abstract

The research-practice gap has been a major source of debate among stakeholders of accounting including practitioners, educators, and researchers. Whether the research-practice gap is real or perceived is a question that seems to remain unanswered. This study attempts to answer this question by tapping into textual data with historical research and practitioner focus, namely, the Academic Elite academic and practitioner focused journals of accounting over 23 years (1997-2020). Study results revealed 10 clusters of research for each journal focus by using latent semantic and topic analyses. The findings of the study confirmed the existence of gap by finding higher numbers of non-overlapping themes compared to the overlapping themes (e.g. corporate governance, and managerial accounting) in Academic Elite and practitioner journal. Regarding the non-overlapping themes, Academic Elite academic journals heavily focused on capital markets and investment whereas practitioner journals predominantly explored tax and accounting practice related issues. This is the first study that quantified the existence of a gap by showing the similar and different themes and their trends using textual data. The findings of this study would be beneficial for the practitioners, educators and researchers in developing the future agenda for various sub-disciplines of accounting.

Authors

• nurettin oner, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Ferhat Devrim Zengul, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• James D Byrd, University of Alabama at Birmingham