Information processing using citations to investigate journal influence in accounting

摘要

The first objective of this study is to investigate the durability or “staying power” of accounting research in representative scholarly journals by evaluating the extent and usage of previous literature in current literature. The value or durability of research can be represented by the pattern of citation vintages that typifies a body of literature. We use the generalized gamma distribution and its four nested models (exponential, Weibull, gamma, and log-normal) to determine a mean, median, and mode for citation age. A second and significant motivation of the study is to objectively rank the relative influence of journals on the accounting literature. Three variations of an impact factor are used to make this analysis. The first impact factor is based upon simple citation count using the proportional method, while the other two impact factors use the results of the time analysis of the data to improve the method of ranking through the emphasis of current publications.