Research-practice gap in accounting journals? A topic modeling approach
Abstract
Purpose
A gap between research and practice is commonly perceived throughout accounting academia. However, empirical evidence on the magnitude of this detachment remains scarce. The authors provide new evidence to the ongoing debate by introducing a novel topic-based approach to capture the research-practice gap and quantify its extent. They also explore regional differences in the research-practice gap.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply the unsupervised machine learning approach Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to compare the topical composition of 2,251 articles from six premier research, practice and bridging journals from the USA and Europe between 2009 and 2019. The authors extend the existing methods of summarizing literature and develop metrics that allow researchers to evaluate the research-practice gap. The authors conduct a plethora of additional analyses to corroborate the findings.
Findings
The results substantiate a pronounced topic-related research-practice gap in accounting literature and document its statistical significance. Moreover, the authors uncover that this gap is more pronounced in the USA than in Europe, highlighting the importance of institutional differences between academic communities.
Practical implications
The authors objectify the debate about the extent of a research-practice gap and stimulate further discussions about explanations and consequences.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to deploy a rigorous machine learning approach to measure a topic-based research-practice gap in the accounting literature. Additionally, the authors provide theoretical rationales for the extent and regional differences in the research-practice gap.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions received from Tom Smith, Bruce Vanstone as well as an anonymous reviewer. The authors also thank the attendants of the European Accounting Association Annual Congress 2022 in Bergen, Norway, as well as the participants of the Doctoral Seminar on Accounting at the Humboldt University of Berlin in October 2021, especially Thorsten Sellhorn, Joachim Gassen, Bernhard Pellens, Nils Crasselt, Sven Hörner, Ulf Brüggemann and Maximilian A. Müller for their valuable feedback.
Citation
Federsel, F.P., Fülbier, R.U. and Seitz, J. (2023), "Research-practice gap in accounting journals? A topic modeling approach", Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JAL-03-2023-0047
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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