International Collaboration in Auditing Research: A Note

• Author: Andreas Andrikopoulos,Stella Zounta,Michalis Bekiaris,Christina Vadasi
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijau.12056
• Date: 01 March 2016

International Collaboration in Auditing Research: A Note

Andreas Andrikopoulos, Michalis Bekiaris, Christina Vadasi and Stella Zounta

University of the Aegean

We investigate the changes and the magnitude of international collaboration in auditing research. We explore

published auditing research in six auditing journals and six accounting journals with broaderreadership, from 1997

to 2014. Our findings indicate that auditing research is mostly collaborative and is increasingly internationalized

but international collaborations are not extensive, accounting for just over 25 percent of collaborative work. The

field is largely dominated by US-affiliated scholars, albeit at a declining rate. Moreover, we find that the

participation of practitioners in research production has gradually declined.

Key words: Auditing research, internationalization, publishing patterns, academic collaboration

1. INTRODUCTION

Researchers, academic institutions and governments

allocate some of their scarce resources, such as time and

money, in the preparation and publication of research

output. Theperceived quality, quantityand impact of this

research affect the orientation of personal career paths,

the strategy of universities and corporations, the political

decisions of governments and regulatory bodies. As the

competition for scarce resources is intense, the demand

for high quality research is effectively inelastic, while

research output runs the high risk of rejection from

reviewers and editors. In this context, collaboration is

indispensable in the production of scientific innovations

(e.g., Hagstrom, 1965). While collaborators share the

problem of potential creative compromise, collective

work blends diverse research talents and scientific

specializations, thereby increasing the quantity and

the variety of scientific output. Increased quantity can

serve as a hedging mechanism against unfavorable and

time-consuming review processes, while diversity can

shape a paper’s competitive advantage and also advance

academic dialogue to novel topics and reoriented

research agendas.

These concerns are particularly relevant for accounting,

since the quantity as well as the qualityof research output

reflects the field’s topical diversity (Panozzo, 1997), the

perceived quality of teaching in accounting schools

(Bell, Frecka, & Solomon, 1993), and even the role of the

government in markets and universities (e.g., Gray,

Guthrie, & Parker, 2002). Previous studies in the

internationalization of accounting research have

identified nationaland linguistic barriers in terms of both

the choice of data set and, more importantly, the

nationality of authors who get published in journals

based in the UK or the US. Lukka and Kasanen (1996)

found that, in a sample of six major journals during the

period from 1984 to 1993, the author’s nationality

coincided with the nationalityof the data set in 77 percent

of cases. Carmona, Gutiérrez, and Camara (1999)

demonstrated linguistic and national barriers in Europe,

where accounting research is dominated by UK-based

scholars and non-English-speaking researchers are

underrepresented and rarely address a wider European

audience. Mathieu and McConomy (2003) reached

similar results for the Canadian accounting community:

French-speaking affiliations had fewer publications

in leading accounting journals compared to their

English-speaking counterparts. Jones and Roberts (2005)

produced further evidence on national barriers in

accounting research, demonstrating that almost 90

percent of the papers published in leading US journals

from 1996 to 2000 were written by scholars who were

affiliated with US-based institutions. They found that

nationality barriers were not tight in the case of the UK

community, where more than 50 percent of the papers

published in leading UK journals were co-authored by

UK-based scholars and authors from overseas.

The international versatility of accounting research is

essential in all areas of accounting. Acrossthe wide range

of accounting scholarship, the international character

of auditing research stands out as auditing practice

and scholarship depend on internationally diverse

institutional and professional frameworks; moreover,

the interdisciplinarity of auditing research fosters

collaboration between scholars from different disciplines.

This paper focuses on international collaborations in

auditing research. Auditing is an academic community

which is characterized by prolific research production,

methodological diversity, increasing impact, and rapid

growth in the population of activescholars (e.g., Stephens

et al., 2011; Bonner et al., 2012); moreover, the principles

and practices of the audit profession share substantial

similarities across different national contexts (e.g., Dunn

2002; Buisman & Guilmour, 2008; Humphrey, Loft, &

Woods, 2009). For all these reasons, the international

community of auditing scholars constitutes an important

case of the interaction between auditing scholars, across

diverse countries, regulatory settings and markets. The

next section of the paper presents and discusses our

results with respect to the internationalization of auditing

research and the final section concludes this paper.

2. THE CROSS SECTION OF

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS

IN AUDITING

We constructed the data set with the purpose of

producing a representative sample of auditing research.

Our sample consists of all auditing research articles that

were published between 1997 and 2014 in six auditing

journals and also six journals of broad readership which

often publish auditing research:1

Correspondence to: Andreas Andrikopoulos, University of the Aegean,

Department of Business Administration, Business School, 8, Michalon

str., Chios, 82100, Greece. Email: apa@aegean.gr

International Journal of Auditing doi:10.1111/ijau.12056

Int. J. Audit.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISSN 1090-6738

20: 66 71 (2016)

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