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Accounting research is hard to define because it has shifted over time. As a rough overview, early accounting research (pre-1960s) was mostly normative (i.e., argued for the “correct” accounting treatment, or what should be). With the advent of the Journal of Accounting Research, advances in finance such as the efficient market hypothesis, and the publication of Ball and Brown’s seminal work in 1968, accounting research moved into positive research (i.e., examining what is rather than what should be). Although this change has had its critics, it has resulted in a significant increase in research output (and many new journals).

A cynical definition of research is: any paper that cites a lot of other accounting papers must be accounting research. This “quick and dirty” definition restricts accounting research to topics and methodologies that are well established in the literature; it is “safe” but somewhat limiting. More rigorously, Oler, Oler, and Skousen (2009) attempt to characterize accounting research by looking at the topics, research methodologies, and citations made by papers published in a set of six top accounting journals (AOS, CAR, JAE, JAR, RAST, and TAR). Their work can be criticized, though, because they do not consider all accounting journals, and because their categorizations of topics (6 of them) and research methodologies (7 of them) are broad. In spite of shortcomings, their paper appears to be the first that attempts to characterize and define accounting research, as follows: “accounting research is research into the effect of economic events on the process of summarizing, analyzing, verifying, and reporting standardized financial information, and on the effects of reported information on economic events.”