To pluralise the past in the sense of recognising other voices and other concerns than those which have been served by accounting regulation; To problematise the present; and To facilitate a revision of the accounting agenda for the future. Impact of the special issue A commonly accepted means of assessing the impact of any published work is to examine the citations of that work at a particular point in time. Such quantitative approaches to assessing impacts, however, do not necessarily reflect the quality of published works. We used Google Scholar to obtain citation data, as at , for the six substantive articles appearing in the special issue. Any citation database is open to criticism for omissions and errors, but Google Scholar is increasingly recognised as achieving broad coverage (Meho and Yang, 2007; Harzing, 2008). The results are summarised in Table 1. [INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE] The broad scope of C&N assists in explaining the large number of citations of this article in comparison with the others. The innovative nature of the methodological article by Hammond and Sikka (henceforth as a guide to oral history in accounting, and “H&S”), possibly its provocative title, may go some way to explaining its position as the paper with the next highest number of citations. In effect, C&N and H&S were providing guidance to authors, including students and emerging scholars, on how to carry out historical accounting research. The other works by prominent authors in the field were, on the other hand, addressing ongoing conversations on themes and topics that continue to attract regular contributions as part of the everyday fabric of historical accounting research. In addition to an overall review of all citations to papers in the special issue, further analysis was undertaken of the citations of C&N in English language sources. This revealed the existence of items that were included twice in the Google Scholar list, items that mentioned C&N only in their references (or as reading”) but not within the body of “further
To pluralise the past in the sense of recognising other voices and other concerns than those which have been served by accounting regulation; To problematise the present; and To facilitate a revision of the accounting agenda for the future. Impact of the special issue A commonly accepted means of assessing the impact of any published work is to examine the citations of that work at a particular point in time. Such quantitative approaches to assessing impacts, however, do not necessarily reflect the quality of published works. We used Google Scholar to obtain citation data, as at , for the six substantive articles appearing in the special issue. Any citation database is open to criticism for omissions and errors, but Google Scholar is increasingly recognised as achieving broad coverage (Meho and Yang, 2007; Harzing, 2008). The results are summarised in Table 1. [INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE] The broad scope of C&N assists in explaining the large number of citations of this article in comparison with the others. The innovative nature of the methodological article by Hammond and Sikka (henceforth “H&S”), as a guide to oral history in accounting, and possibly its provocative title, may go some way to explaining its position as the paper with the next highest number of citations. In effect, C&N and H&S were providing guidance to authors, including students and emerging scholars, on how to carry out historical accounting research. The other works by prominent authors in the field were, on the other hand, addressing ongoing conversations on themes and topics that continue to attract regular contributions as part of the everyday fabric of historical accounting research. In addition to an overall review of all citations to papers in the special issue, further analysis was undertaken of the citations of C&N in English language sources. This revealed the existence of items that were included twice in the Google Scholar list, items that mentioned C&N only in their references (or as “further reading”) but not within the body of
Carnegie_Napier_Past_Present_and_Future_AAAJ_2012_final.docx