Cite and Seek: Identifying Research 'Classics' and Citation Structures in Specialist Accounting History Journals, 1996 to 2008

This paper reports on an analysis of 5,750 citations appearing in over 500 articles published across 1996 to 2008 in the three specialised, English language, accounting history journals. The purposes of the research were to better understand the corpus of literature within these journals and, in particular, to explore the significance and interrelationships of this journal network and the scholarly community which supports it, via the identification of citation structures and influential works. The findings of the study revealed that there was a group of commonly cited articles across the three journals, largely drawn from accounting journals which focus on publishing works in the interpretive and critical traditions, but that none of these articles were from the three specialist accounting history journals. While there was observable insularity in the citation patterns within the three focal journals, there was also unanticipated heterogeneity in the citation patterns across these journals. Further, although the results are disappointing with respect to the incorporation of works in business, economic and management history into papers published in the focal journals, the results nevertheless suggest that accounting history, as a discipline, can foster excellence in research which is recognised not only within its own research community, but also in the accounting discipline in the broader sense.