AAA Spark Meeting of Regions

Developing an Empirical Map of Accounting Education Research Using Topic Modeling

• In Event: TLC: Ethics, Accounting Education and White Collar Crimes

Abstract

Accounting education journals play a central role in disseminating best practices of teaching and instructional resources to assist accounting faculty. Even though there have been series of seminal systematic reviews covering the literature from accounting education journals, these studies cover fairly short periods or very focused single topical areas. There has not been a study that attempted to synthesize almost four decades of history of accounting education journals. Using the advancements in natural language processing and text mining, this study develops an empirical map of accounting education research from four major journals: Issues in Accounting Education, The Accounting Educator’s Journal, Journal of Accounting Education, and Accounting Education. To address this gap, we used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to examine 2,527 articles published from 1983 to 2002 in Issues in Accounting Education, The Accounting Educator’s Journal, Journal of Accounting Education, and Accounting Education. This analysis identified ten distinct research themes including, Classroom interventions and Student Performance (T-1), Ethics, and Corporate Governance (T-2), Skill Development (T-3), Financial Accounting Standards (T-4), Gender and Diversity (T-5), Financial Accounting T-6), Accreditation and Curriculum (T-7), Publishing Cases and Manuscripts (T-8), Managerial and Cost Accounting Education (T-9), Faculty and Administration (T-10). We further examined the trends of these topics over time and the associations between these topics and journals.

Authors

• nurettin oner, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Ferhat Devrim Zengul, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

• Jennifer Hamrick, University of Alabama at Birmingham