Abstract
Consistent with the social and institutional paradigm, countries with similar cultures, such as Italy and Spain, may show similar trends in the development of accounting research. This article develops a Comparative International Accounting History perspective, which is aimed at comparing accounting history subjects and themes in different countries. This research analyses publication patterns in accounting, understanding emerging topics and fields. It compares the last 20 years of Italian and Spanish accounting journals, developing a content analysis of each issue in the 20-year time frame from 1994 to 2014. Highlighting common trends and insights, this article adds to previous literature that examines publishing patterns of research in accounting journals from a historical point of view. It demonstrates that accounting research is developing beyond the institutional paradigm, showing an internationalisation process and trends consistent with Anglo-Saxon Journals.
Keywords
Introduction
Over the last several decades, internationalisation processes have affected many academic fields, including accounting. Consistent with Gomes et al. (2015), this article contributes to the effort to bring national research into the international arena, helping scholars to understand where Italian and Spanish research stands now and how studies have evolved. To do so, we compare the most recent publication trends in two national accounting journals from a historical point of view (Fowler and Keeper, 2016), considering a 20-year time frame (1994–2014). The selected journals, RIREA (Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria e di Economia Aziendale 1 (Italian Journal of Accounting and Business Administration)) and REFC (Revista Española de Financiación y Contabilidad (Spanish Journal of Finance and Accounting)), represent the major Italian and Spanish journals of accounting. In fact, RIREA is the longest-running Italian accounting journal, with more than a hundred year history. It was founded in 1901 as the Journal of Accounting (Rivista di Ragioneria) and changed its name to the Italian Journal of Accounting (Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria) in 1908 and to the Italian Journal of Accounting and Business Administration (RIREA) in 1972, which is the current denomination. It was founded when academics started considering accounting to be a ‘scientific’ discipline, and therefore it deeply represents Italian history and traditions in this subject area. It then changed its name from Rivista di Ragioneria with the subtitle Bollettino del Collegio dei ragionieri di Roma to Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria, as the articles gradually covered the entire newly unified Italian territory, at the same time when the national accountants association (Associazione Nazionale dei Ragionieri) was born. After the foundation of Economia Aziendale as an independent subject (1927), the journal started to broaden its content, becoming RIREA in 1972, thus including the Economia Aziendale in the name (De Cristofaro and Mascetti, 2012). REFC was founded in 1972 by AECA (Asociación Española de Contabilidad y Administración de Empresas, the Spanish Association of Accounting and Business Administration, Madrid), and it is considered to be the most relevant and qualified Spanish accounting journal, with the greatest contribution to scientific research (Amat Salas et al., 2001; Escobar Pérez et al., 2005). In particular, from 1972 until the founding of Revista de Contabilidad in 1997, REFC was the only Spanish journal for accounting and finance research.
The research approach in this study is consistent with the social and institutional paradigm (Nobes and Parker, 2008; Potter, 2005), which maintains that culture (Hofstede, 1980) as well as local, time-specific factors can shape accounting changes (Gray, 1988). Therefore, we explore whether countries with similar cultures show similar trends in the development of accounting research. In fact, Spain and Italy have many characteristics in common. Apart from similar geographical contexts and legal systems, they have gone through similar changes in university reforms and in accounting research. Historically, they reached significant milestones in accounting traditions, while more recently they hosted the Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association (EEA) in the 1990s. Expanding the Comparative International Accounting History (CIAH) perspective (Antonelli and D’Alessio, 2011; Carnegie and Napier, 2002), this article analyses research topics, authors and affiliations in order to give some insights from the past (Fowler and Keeper, 2016) that have influenced the present and may continue to affect the future. This analysis should be useful to researchers interested in exploring academic accounting trends and in comparative international accounting.
The article develops as follows: first, we review the main international and national literature which analyses accounting publications, also focusing on international comparative research and accounting history (AH). Then, we outline the research questions and methodology. Finally, we discuss the main results, both exploring the journals and identifying common and different trends. We conclude with some critical remarks while trying to provide some insights for future research.
Theoretical framework and literature review
Our research is based on the social and institutional paradigm, which maintains that local, time-specific factors can shape changes in accounting standards (Potter, 2005). In fact, we believe that there are strong links between accounting and culture, as culture impacts accounting models (Nobes and Parker, 2008). Culture, defined as ‘the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another’ (Hofstede, 1980: 26), and environmental factors can help explain international differences in accounting standards (Salter and Niswander, 1995), specifically in corporate financial reporting systems (Gray, 1988). From this perspective, countries with similar cultures may show similar trends in the development of accounting methods and research. Italy and Spain, for example, might show similar trends in their most relevant accounting journals.
Following Napier (2006), there are two possible perspectives in studying change: a general level or a specific level, understanding local issues and stories. This article adopts a midway perspective, trying to understand change at the meso-level by comparing national cultures and research patterns.
Many scholars have observed from various perspectives that recent accounting research traditions need to be analysed. Some papers concerning the analysis of accounting journals underline the need to widen the research by including other journals as samples (Carnegie and Potter, 2000). While analysing international accounting research, many authors underline that English culture is usually predominant (Bisman, 2012) and that non-English written research has problems in being shared across European countries (Carmona et al., 1999). In particular, Antonelli and D’Alessio (2011: 471) believe that ‘research by non-English speakers is presently limited in its influence within the English-speaking world’ and that ‘an international comparison between Italian evidence and that of other countries would be very useful to understand the “country-specific” conditions under which accounting history is developed in academic and non-academic contexts’. Other authors underline the need to bring national non-English research into the international arena (Carmona and Zan, 2002; Gomes et al., 2015). Our research tries to fill this gap. Starting from the need to disseminate national accounting research abroad, it is aimed at understanding national trends and comparing two specific non-Anglo-Saxon countries, Italy and Spain.
We also develop the CIAH perspective, which comes from Carnegie and Napier (2002) and was further developed by Antonelli and D’Alessio (2011). It is aimed at comparing accounting subjects and themes in different countries. Although we do not aim at analysing AH publications, we believe that we contribute to the development of the CIAH perspective when unravelling the main themes and trends in accounting research over a significant period of time (20 years). A comparative approach is particularly interesting when analysing non-English-speaking countries. Adapting Nobes and Parker (2008), we provide three reasons why a comparative approach is appropriate:
It serves as a reminder that interesting contributions may also emerge from non-Anglo-Saxon countries;
It demonstrates that accountants and scholars from different countries can learn from each other;
It can show whether processes of international harmonisation are developing.
Although international journals are dominated by English-focused research, some authors have noticed that an internationalisation process is occurring. There seems to be stronger engagement by scholars from Italy, Portugal, France, Spain and Germany in the international journals of AH (Fowler and Keeper, 2016). In this research, we analyse two of these countries with the aim of unravelling research trends in themes and authorship, keeping our specific focus on the internationalisation process. By providing insights from Italian and Spanish accounting traditions, we also contribute to circulating Italian and Spanish cultures and histories abroad, bringing them into the international arena.
Italy and Spain have long traditions in accounting. The earliest surviving book on double-entry bookkeeping was published in 1494 by the Italian Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli. However, as was recently pointed out by Hernández-Esteve (1992), the earliest ‘manual on double-entry bookkeeping’ was written in 1458 by the merchant Benedetto Cotrugli (Sangster and Rossi, 2018: 26). The manuscript was entitled Libro de l’arte de la Mercatura (Book of the Art of Trade), and it is known as Cotrugli’s treatise (Sangster and Rossi, 2018).
Spain has also had significant milestones in accounting. For example, the Pragmatic Sanction of Cigales, signed by King Carlos I on 4 December 1549, made the Castilian Kingdom one of the first European countries to adopt double-entry bookkeeping (Hernández-Esteve, 1996). Spain is one of the protagonists of accounting and, in particular, of Historia de la Contabilidad. 2
The academic literature concerning accounting research trends has been developing since the 1980s both concerning international and national journals. In the following section, we review the main contributions to the analysis of accounting research trends.
Heck and Bremser (1986) published one of the earliest summaries of the history of an accounting journal. They analysed The Accounting Review from its foundation (1926) to the present (1986). They primarily analysed authorship trends, counting the contributions of the most significant authors and considering affiliations. They found that the journal had significantly grown over time, as the number of single authors and articles more than doubled in a 60-year time frame. However, the article is purely descriptive and has no measure for considering the papers’ quality. Carmona et al. (1999) analysed authorship patterns in 13 top accounting journals during the period 1992–1997. Their aim was to understand whether common trends in European accounting research actually exist. They found that English culture was predominant in the journals. They concluded that non-English written research has problems in being shared across European countries. Carnegie and Potter’s (2000) work analysed three specialist AH journals in English during the period 1996–1999. Each journal was representative of a country/region: the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia/New Zealand. They found some trends, such as the reluctance by researchers to collaborate with foreign authors and the prevalence of research from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the time periods studied. They underlined possible opportunities for further research, which included performing a similar analysis on a larger sample to capture the discipline of accounting more broadly.
A few years later, Anderson (2002) developed Heck and Bremser’s (1986) approach, as he analysed one specific AH journal, Accounting, Business & Financial History. He aimed at extending Carnegie and Potter’s (2000) conclusions: the authors believed that there is still much content analysis to perform on AH journals. Analysing the first 10 issues of Accounting, Business & Financial History (from 1990 to 2000), Anderson developed a rigorous in-depth content analysis of the articles contained in the journal. He found a significant trend towards geographical concentration even at an international level. In fact, most authors belonged to a small number of countries (the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia), with the United Kingdom being the most dominant. Anderson called it ‘home country influence’. However, he believed that this kind of research was useful to ‘add to our knowledge of past developments, provide explanations for present structures and practices, [. . .] [and] help predict possible future developments’ (Anderson, 2002: 2).
Napier (2006) focused on the ways in which AH research developed in a specific journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society. The author underlined that historical research was slow to emerge and that the main countries researched in the journal were the United States, the United Kingdom and the English-speaking countries of the former British Empire. Similar results were found by Sánchez-Matamoros and Gutiérrez-Hidalgo (2011), who analysed the publication patterns in generalist accounting journals from 2001 to 2008, concluding that AH articles are a minority, ranging from 1 to 25 per cent of the total number of articles per journal. Bisman developed two analyses, the first in 2011 (Bisman, 2011) studying three AH journals in English from 1996 to 2008 through a citation analysis, and the second in 2012 (Bisman, 2012) via a qualitative thematic analysis on the 15 years between 1996 and 2010 in the journal Accounting History. The article observes that writing in AH has been dominated by English authors and those from English-speaking countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada). However, the article simply describes the main trends in the journal from a purely qualitative point of view.
Gaunt (2014) analysed authorship, content and citation trends in Accounting and Finance from 1979 to 2012. He found some trends towards multi-authored articles and the internationalisation of authors. He also showed that the journal’s size had increased through time, as the number of articles and pages per year had grown. He provided a classification of the number of articles per subject area, introducing two macro classifications for ‘accounting’ and ‘finance’. He noted that the number of ‘finance’ articles significantly increased when the journal’s name changed from Accounting Education to Accounting and Finance.
Gomes et al. (2015) reviewed three English-language AH journals, from 2005 to 2013. They found a relationship between geographical affiliation and empirical setting, considering countries as the unit of analysis. However, they concluded that more research is still needed and underlined the need to diffuse local/national research in the international context.
Fowler and Keeper (2016) examined publication patterns in AH, understanding emerging topics and fields. They found a predominant Anglo-Saxon focus in both research and authors. They also found that the number of single-authored publications in volumes decreased, and they found an increasing internationalisation of the journal and increasing international collaboration. They concluded that internationalisation is driven by stronger engagement by scholars from Italy, Portugal, France, Spain and, more recently, Germany; that there is some change in what is being researched and an expansion in the number of multi-authored articles; and that the breadth of time and geographical coverage has improved.
While English-based research is known widely, non-English research in AH is less known abroad. Due to language barriers, non-English journals can only be understood by a national author or by an English-speaking author with a deep knowledge of the specific language. However, some papers are starting to bring national non-English accounting trends to an international audience (Bisman, 2012).
As for Italian and Spanish research, some authors have developed reviews and content analyses of their national accounting journals. However, such contributions are still fragmented and incomplete. Most of them are not available to an international audience, as they are written in national languages (Antonelli and D’Alessio, 2011).
Research question and method
This article belongs to the field of historical investigation in academic research (Fowler and Keeper, 2016), as it is aimed at analysing and comparing two accounting journals over a 20-year period, RIREA and REFC.
It develops a content analysis of the two journals’ articles over a 20-year period, between 1994 and 2014. We considered a 20-year time period because it provides a reasonable cycle to understand the main changes in each journal’s articles in terms of publication patterns, the geographical composition of authors, the countries or regions studied, the themes researched and the time periods covered (Nobes and Parker, 2008). A rather lengthy time is usually chosen by those who analyse a single journal (Anderson, 2002; Gaunt, 2014; Heck and Bremser, 1986), while research that analyses more than one journal at a time usually considers a shorter time period (Giovannoni and Riccaboni, 2009; Gomes et al., 2015; Sánchez-Matamoros and Gutiérrez-Hidalgo, 2011). This article also enhances the scope of this kind of research, as it considers two journals over a 20-year time frame. As we look for relevant trends in accounting research and academia, they might not occur in a shorter time period. Moreover, between 1994 and 2014, large changes were occurring in academic work practices with the development of the Internet, IT systems and networks, making communication and cooperation easier and faster. In addition, national accounting begins to be affected by standardisation and the international harmonisation of accounting standards.
As the aim of this article is to compare two countries that share a similar culture and traditions, we decided to select Spain and Italy. In fact, they belong to a geographical area that has some similar characteristics. They belong to the Latin culture, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon or Germanic cultures (Nobes and Parker, 2008). They also have similar legal systems (codified Roman law) together with France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal, which means that the main institutions and the internal roles are comparable. Moreover, by analysing the general development of the university context and research funding system, we can affirm that both countries have experienced processes of change in recent decades. In fact, general Spanish scientific production as well as accounting research started to play a relevant role in national research in the 1980s, with the Ley de Reforma Universitaria (LRU), and in the last 20 years, it nearly doubled (Gonzalo and Mora, 2010).
A radical reform process also occurred in the Italian academy starting in the 1990s with the publication of Law 537/1993 (Lissoni et al., 2013; Moscati, 2001). The Italian academic context is mostly characterised by public universities, which are funded through public grants. Regarding the funding mechanism, we can highlight three fundamental reforms: Law 537/1993, which established that Italian universities are funded by Fondo di Finanziamento Ordinario 3 (FFO), the introduction of the Valutazione triennale della ricerca 4 (VTR) system in December 2003 by the Italian Committee for the Evaluation of Research and the Valutazione della qualità della ricerca 5 (VQR) evaluation mechanism that started in November 2011 by the National Agency for Evaluation of Universities and Research (ANVUR). In particular, research output quality is currently measured by the VQR in terms of relevance, originality and internationalisation (ANVUR 6 ).
Within the Spanish context, public universities started to play a relevant role in national research in the 1980s with the publication of the LRU 7 (Jiménez-Contreras et al., 2003). Jiménez-Contreras et al. (2003) note that the reform increased the number of employed researchers in Spanish public universities between 1980 and 1998. In the 1990s, the Spanish government increased its investments in research and development (R&D), and the percentage of scientific contributions strongly rose between 1989 and 1998. The growth of Spanish research output was characterised by changes in the evaluation mechanism implemented by the national organisation responsible for the evaluation of Spanish researchers, the CNEAI (Comisión Nacional de Evaluación de la Actividad Investigadora). 8 The CNEAI determines access to research funds based on publications evaluated in 6-year periods, the so-called sexenios. Due to these parallel paths in university reforms in these two countries, academic research should have developed following a similar pace.
Finally, both Italy and Spain experienced the Annual Congress of the EEA at the very beginning of the period we chose. In fact, it was hosted in 1992 in Spain by the University of Alcalà de Henares and in 1994 in Italy by the University of Venice. In addition to digital technologies, the Annual Congress of the EEA could have been an occasion of great circulation and growth of ideas among accounting academics.
The journals were chosen because they well represent Italian and Spanish accounting traditions. The Italian journal, RIREA, is the oldest (founded in 1901) national accounting journal still being published. Its aim is to encourage the advancement of knowledge in the business management area, thanks to intersubjective control of the research products in order to support the development of concepts, analytical models, explicative, teleological, normative, discussion of case histories, scientific inquiry and technology in all possible directions. 9 RIREA is accredited by AIDEA (Italian Accounting Academy) and is covered by the ACNP (Italian catalogue of journals). Publications in RIREA are relevant at a national level for Italian scholars’ careers.
It was also selected for use in recent research by Di Pietra and Baldi (2014), Coronella (2015) and Patuelli and Carungu (2016).
REFC was founded in 1972 by AECA, and it is a quarterly academic journal. It aims to publish high-quality research papers in accounting and finance. The scope of REFC covers theoretical and empirical analysis relating to financial markets and institutions, corporate finance, market microstructure, corporate governance, internal and management accounting and a wide spectrum of financial performance and financial reporting, including auditing and public accounting.
REFC has been covered by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in the Web of Knowledge (Clarivate Analytics) since 2008 and is in the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR). It is also indexed in RECYT, IN-RECS, MIAR, ISOC-Economía, Latindex, ICALI and SCOPUS. 10
Escobar Pérez et al. (2005), reviewing the most relevant Spanish accounting journals from 1988 to 2001, concluded that REFC has the best characteristics to be considered an academic journal. They recognised that REFC has more academic characteristics than the other Spanish journals of accounting. Amat Salas et al. (2001) described REFC as the most qualified journal for scientific publications in Spain.
Therefore, these two general accounting journals represent the main changes in the Italian and Spanish accounting research and academia, reflecting the great circulation of ideas that followed the European Accounting Association (EAA) conferences, the similar pace in university reforms and the common institutional roles.
Our sample is composed of 1,619 total articles from RIREA and REFC. We did not include the editorial papers or the special issues editions. For data collection, while REFC is entirely available in a digital format, most of the RIREA’s articles are not digitalised, and we needed to work on physical volumes.
The data collection phase involved several steps. First, we collected the indices, titles, authors, affiliations, and abstracts or introductions from each journal. In RIREA’s case, we needed to digitalise the volumes, as they were available only in physical copies, while REFC’s articles were already available on the website. After the digitalisation, we built an Excel data set and we classified each article by the following information: number of authors, institutional affiliation and country for each author, main topic of the article, time period and region studied, and year of publication.
Second, we based our method on Anderson’s (2002) categorisation, adapting it to our needs and aims and basing it on other similar research. Third, we used a content analysis to classify the titles and abstracts/introductions. Content analysis is a method widely adopted because it allows replication and valid inferences from data gathered (Guthrie et al., 2004; Krippendorff, 1980). We used the single article as a unit of analysis. Articles are not divided into subcategories. Each article was considered as a single unit, and its major focus was considered for classifications (Anderson, 2002). When articles fell into two or more categories, we determined the predominant category.
Overall, this research was aimed at analysing the two journals by focusing on authorship, topics, time periods and settings considered in the empirical analysis. First, we sought to question whether internationalisation occurs in similar ways. In fact, in some cases, researchers are reluctant to collaborate with authors located outside their country (Carnegie and Potter, 2000), but there has recently been an increasing internationalisation of accounting journals and small increases in international collaborations (Nobes and Parker, 2008). Moreover, as there seems to be a close relationship between author affiliation and country or region studied (Fowler and Keeper, 2016), the same internationalisation trends could also appear in the papers’ topics.
After internationalisation patterns, we tested whether other findings from previous literature occur in our sample. Gaunt (2014) and Fowler and Keeper (2016), for example, found a growing trend towards multi-authored articles, while single-authored articles decreased over time.
As for the papers’ topics, we used Anderson’s (2002) framework and we adapted it to our context. The categories we considered for thematic classification are listed in Table 1.
Topic classification.
Categories added by the authors.
In particular, in the ‘General’ category, we classified articles based on the economic and financial situation for each country, and we used the ‘Miscellaneous’ category as a residual group. 11
For the empirical settings and time periods, we adapted Gomes et al.’s (2015) methodology. The categories we used are listed in Tables 2 and 3.
Empirical setting classification, adapted from Gomes et al. (2015).
Time period classification.
Papers included in the ‘General’ topic are usually classified within the ‘Current time period’ category as they analyse current items.
Papers classified as ‘Past time period’ are related to previous periods of analysis with respect to the year of the publication.
‘Non-specific time period’ includes all other papers.
Findings
In this section, we provide the results of the analysis concerning REFC and RIREA. The database contains 611 research articles from REFC and 1,008 from RIREA. First, we started analysing the main trends in the papers’ topics. Most of the articles in the Spanish journal are classified in the ‘General’ category (26.7%), which is composed of articles about the Spanish Stock Exchange (see Table 4). Papers classified in the ‘Financial Accounting’ category are also common (22.4% of the articles from 1994 to 2014), and this is followed by ‘Financial and General Management’ (13.8%) and ‘Banking’ (6.7%). The other primary categories are ‘Cost and Management Accounting’ (5.9%), ‘Auditing’ (5.7%) and ‘Public Sector Accounting’ (5.4%).
Spanish topics.
The predominant topic in RIREA is ‘Financial Accounting’ (see Table 5). However, ‘Financial Accounting’ papers significantly diminish through time, from more than a hundred papers in 1994–1999 to fewer than 60 in 2010–2014. There is a similar trend in Spain, where Financial Accounting articles decrease from 62 to 22 for the same periods. Papers classified in the ‘Accounting History’ group are always present in RIREA, whereas in REFC they are missing in the last 5 years (2010–2014).
Italian topics.
The presence of national specialist AH journals in both countries might contribute to explaining why AH themes are poorly addressed in RIREA and REFC. Cinquini et al. (2008) believe that AH associations contribute to AH research. In Italy, the activities of the Italian Society of Accounting History (SISR 12 ), which was founded in Pisa in August 1984, during the IV International Congress of Accounting History, might have had some impact on research trends, as SISR founded a specialist AH journal in 2001, Cultura e Contabilità Aziendale (Accounting and Cultures 13 ), which publishes two issues per year. In Spain, the AECA founded the journal De Computis 14 in 2004, which is a biannual scientific journal that accepts papers written in the main European languages.
Both RIREA and REFC show growth in Social and Environmental Accounting, which goes from 3 papers in the first period to 13 papers in the last years in RIREA and also increases from no papers in the period 1994–1999 to 7 papers in the period 2010–2014 in REFC.
Italian papers classified in the Public Sector Accounting category grow from 11 in the 1994–1999 period to 33 in 2010–2014 in RIREA, and they decreased from 16 to 4 publications for the same period in REFC.
Tables 4 and 5 show the structure and evolution of the topics in REFC and RIREA in the 20-year period, also emphasising the changes per 5 years.
Figures 1 and 2 show the four main trends in topics in Spain and Italy.
Spanish topics.
Italian topics.
Authorship trends show mixed results in both Spain and Italy. While Italian single-authored papers are prevalent through the last 20 years, Spanish papers do not show the same trend. REFC papers do not have a unique prevalence in authorship during the 20 years. However, similar tendencies arise when analysing how authorship trends develop through time. In both countries, single-authored papers significantly decrease, while the number of papers written by two or more authors increases, showing a clear trend towards multi-authorship.
Spanish single-authored papers decrease from more than 47 per cent in the 1990s to just over 9 per cent between 2010 and 2014. While papers with two authors stay stable overall (from 34.9% to 31.1%), papers with more than three authors significantly grow, from nearly 18 per cent in 1994–1999 to nearly 60 per cent in 2010–2014.
In Italy, single-authored papers decrease from almost 94 per cent of total articles in the 1990s to nearly 64 per cent in the last period. Papers with two authors grow from 4.4 per cent (13 articles) in 1994–1999 to 23.3 per cent (51 articles) in 2010–2014, while papers with three or more authors grow from 1.3 per cent in 1994–1999 (four articles) to 12.8 per cent in 2010–2014 (28 articles). Due to the significant ‘individualism’ in the 1990s, Italian publications might be a consequence of scholars’ career requirements of that time, which supported a clear identification of authors and theories.
Such results are consistent with Gaunt (2014), who analysed an international accounting journal over more than 30 years. He found that single-authored articles decreased through time while noticing a growing trend towards multi-authored articles.
Data are shown in Tables 6 and 7 and Figures 3 and 4.
Spanish authorship trends.
Italian authorship trends.
Spanish authorship trends.
Italian authorship trends.
We further analysed the authorship trends, aiming at understanding whether multiple-authored works involved researchers from the same affiliation (at the University level) or whether collaboration between different affiliations is prevalent. To do this, we constructed a smaller sample of the database, only selecting those papers with more than one author. We built a model separating and counting the papers whose authors belong entirely to the same affiliation (‘Common Affiliations’) and papers whose authors belong to different affiliations (‘Different Affiliations’).
Again, the two countries show mixed results. Both countries show that common affiliation is the prevalent kind of cooperation. However, they differ in how the trends change through time. The Italian case shows a growing trend towards ‘Different Affiliations’ articles, which are increasing faster overall than ‘Common Affiliation’ articles. This means that the journal has gradually increased the articles involving different contributors, increasing collaborations between different universities and enhancing the exchange of ideas.
The Spanish journal shows partially different trends, as different affiliations remain overall stable and common affiliations decrease over time. Overall, most authors collaborate with scholars from their own country (Sánchez-Matamoros and Gutiérrez-Hidalgo, 2010).
Data are shown in Tables 8 and 9 and Figures 5 and 6.
Spanish affiliation trends.
Italian affiliation trends.
Spanish affiliation trends.
Italian affiliation trends.
From a deeper analysis of the Different Affiliations category, we focused on trends between different affiliations within the same country and with other countries. The results are significant in the Spanish context. We find more collaborations with authors from foreign countries in the last time period. In contrast, we note an insignificant presence in the Italian context over the same period.
Detailed results are shown in Tables 10 and 11.
Spanish different affiliations trends.
Italian different affiliations trends.
Finally, we attempt to analyse co-authorship between local authors and English-speaking authors. With regard to the Italian journal, the results are not relevant as we found only one article written by an Italian author and an English-speaking author, whereas in the Spanish journal, we found nine collaborations between local authors and English-speaking authors.
Then, we analysed the time settings of the articles over this 20-year period. Our aim is to understand which time setting is prevalent in accounting research and whether such a trend changes over time. There is a distinction between a ‘past time period’ (PT) and AH papers. In fact, an article is considered as set in a past period when the analysed context and published data refer to the ‘past’.
The results show some common features and some country-specific characteristics. In fact, both Italy and Spain show that the ‘current time period’ (CT) is the prevalent time setting overall. CT papers decrease in percentage in both countries over the 20-year period of study. While PT papers are generally stable in the Italian case, they show a narrow increase in the Spanish journals, growing from nearly 12 per cent to 17 per cent of all papers, showing an increasing interest in retrieving past studies (Tables 12 and 13).
Spanish time period settings.
Italian time period settings.
Finally, we analysed the empirical setting of the studies. For the time-setting analysis, this phase is aimed at understanding whether some areas are more prevalent and whether there is a trend towards internationalisation.
In both countries, most articles focus on the national setting or do not explicitly outline their research settings (non-specific region (NSR)). Especially in the Spanish case, NSR papers increase because they are correlated with the papers on the Spanish Stock Exchange classified in the ‘General’ topic and in an NSR. More trends emerge as far as the internationalisation process is concerned. In fact, both journals show a significantly growing trend in ‘cross-country setting’ (CCS) studies, which grow from nearly 11 per cent in 1994–1999 to nearly 30 per cent in 2010–2014 in Spain, while Italian CCS papers grow from nearly 11 per cent to 15 per cent in the latter period. Such results confirm an increasing internationalisation of the journals, as far as the research setting is concerned. The data are shown in Tables 14 and 15.
Spanish empirical settings.
Italian empirical settings.
Table 16 and Table 17 summarise the results. In particular, Table 16 includes the main findings from the Spanish and Italian journals. Table 17 highlights how RIREA and REFC’s results (as an example of non-English-speaking countries’ research trends) are consistent with previous studies from Anglo-Saxon journals.
Similarities and differences between Spain and Italy.
Similarities and differences between the group Italy, Spain and other studies.
RIREA: Rivista Italiana di Ragioneria e di Economia Aziendale; REFC: Revista Española de Financiación y Contabilidad.
Conclusion
This article highlights that in the last 20 years, Spanish and Italian accounting research followed similar trends, widening the research themes, increasing collaborations between scholars and showing some trends towards internationalisation.
On one hand, this article contributes to develop the CIAH perspective (Antonelli and D’Alessio, 2011; Carnegie and Napier, 2002), finding common patterns in the Spanish and Italian accounting journals, focusing on topics, authorship patterns, time and empirical settings. However, it does not confirm the social and institutional paradigm (Gray, 1988; Potter, 2005), as such trends are consistent with international Anglo-Saxon journals. Overall, it seems that such uniform trends extend farther than countries with similar cultures, such as Spain and Italy, showing a process of ‘globalisation’ across accounting research, which occurs in English-speaking journals as well. Therefore, globalising research trends are not restricted to countries with similar cultures; they represent a global trend.
As for topics, General topics in Spain and Financial Accounting in Italy are prevalent over the 20-year period of study, even though their relevance has decreased in the last few years, consistent with previous AH reviews (Ferri et al., 2018; Walker, 2008). Similarly, cost and management accounting have diminished over time in both journals; together with the decrease in financial accounting, RIREA and REFC confirm a decrease in the technical core of subjects in accounting (Ferri et al., 2018; Walker, 2008). Nevertheless, public sector accounting has grown in recent periods in Italy, confirming previous research (Bisman, 2012; Edwards and Walker, 2009), while it has diminished in REFC. Social and environmental accounting themes have continuously grown in both countries over the time period studied, confirming the growing interest in these fields (Deegan, 2017; Parker, 2014). Financial and general management is more prevalent in recent periods in Spain.
In both countries, there is a significant trend towards multi-authored papers, which is consistent with the findings of Gaunt (2014). In particular, Spanish papers with more than two authors rise to 59.4 per cent of all articles during the last 5 years. Papers written by authors with different affiliations grow in both countries, reaching the same level (around 33%), although the initial percentages were different: Spain started at 30 per cent, and Italy started at 24 per cent. These results confirm previous research (Patuelli and Carungu, 2016), which concluded that the exchange of ideas in Italian accounting research is increasing.
In both countries, the internationalisation process was driven by a change in the process of recruitment for an academic career, which is now based on meritocracy and on evaluation criteria with a focus on international quality standards (Murgia et al., 2016). In both countries, the teaching and research system is also influenced by the common aim for a European Higher Education Area, established during the two European Council agreements in Bologna (1999) and Lisbon (2000).
As for empirical settings, Italian research shows more interest in CCS than does Spanish research. Concerning time periods, most articles in both countries focus on the present time or on non-specific times. However, PT papers increased during 2010–2014. It seems that AH is more often studied in the Italian journal than in the Spanish journal, although AH papers are a minority in both journals, confirming that they are slow to emerge in generalist journals (Napier, 2006). In general, this pattern may have been influenced by the fact that AECA, the founder of REFC, founded another journal in 2004 specialising in AH (De Computis – Revista Española de Historia de la Contabilidad). In Italy, a specialist journal (Cultura e Contabilità Aziendale) was founded in 2001 as well. This may represent a limitation in our research, as it may distort the AH publication patterns. Notwithstanding this, PT studies in Spain are more prevalent than in the Italian context. Our research did not include special issues, where AH papers have generous space.
This research contributes to the literature as it helps to show accounting traditions in several ways. First, as noted before, it confirms theories developed in the international arena, extending their scope. In addition, it proves that the Italian and Spanish journals we analysed follow similar trends, widening their core subjects and collaborations between authors, consistent with trends in international journals. This article also contributes to filling the gap outlined by recent research (Carmona and Zan, 2002; Giovannoni and Riccaboni, 2009; Gomes et al., 2015) and by Italian past authors (Giannessi, 1954). Finally, it helps bring evidence from non-English accounting research into the international arena, showcasing and analysing Italian and Spanish trends.
Further extensions of this research might include a longer time period or an extension in the number of countries analysed. Further research could also consist of a citation analysis of the articles or investigating whether and how the research methods have changed during the time period studied. One limitation of this study could be caused by the heterogeneous forms of the articles published in the past. As articles did not have the same structure over the years, it might be difficult to make an analytical comparison.
