Accounting and Finance at forty: a retrospective evaluation

Abstract Accounting and Finance has evolved from a news bulletin to a full‐grown refereed academic journal that has published papers written by authors from Australia, New Zealand, the United States of America, Canada, Europe and Asia. The Journal published its 41st volume in 2001 and that anniversary issue coincides with the beginning of the new millennium. As part of the celebration of this important milestone, this article reviews the Journal's evolution, the variety of papers published and the Journal's impact on accounting and finance research in the Asia Pacific region. Data for 394 papers published in the Journal by 570 authors are analysed. I find that the distribution of institutions and authors that have published in the Journal is highly skewed, with the top five (11) institutions accounting for 35 per cent (51 per cent) of the published papers in the Journal. Similarly, 8 per cent of the authors have published 26 per cent of the articles in the Journal. Analysis of the citation pattern indicates that Accounting and Finance does not have much impact on research published in the Asia Pacific region, with the Journal accounting for only 1.06 per cent of all citations in the selected Asia Pacific journals. Sub‐period analysis indicates that not even the establishment of the editorial board in the latter half of the 1990s has helped improve the impact of the Journal on research published in the Asia Pacific region. However, compared with other Asia‐Pacific journals, Accounting and Finance has the strongest impact on publications in the selected journals. The impact is even stronger in the latter half of the 1990s. Also, the impact of Accounting and Finance on the more recent journals in the Asia Pacific region is stronger than that of the other more established journals.