Editorial

The Origins of Academic Production in Accounting Science

In Colombia, one of the main challenges to be faced while going through the process of indexing a journal on Accountancy is to count on the production of enough papers and articles that, derived from research projects, meet the quality standards demanded by the editorial policies of the publications.

The challenge is further widened by the fact that the number of journals containing accountancy issues and being covered by the national system, Publindex, is gradually increasing. The schools of Economic Science of several universities such as Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad del Valle, and Universidad Nueva Granada among others, as well as periodical publications such as Revista de Contaduría de la Universidad de Antioquia and Cuadernos de Contabilidad de la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá, have inserted themselves in the logic of indexation thus widening the publishing possibilities of articles on accountancy.

At the same time, the number of research groups that have joined the science and technology national system and that deal, whether directly or indirectly, with accounting topics, approaches 60 or thereabouts, according to the most recent figures issued by the national call for papers organized by Colciencias. After the first survey of such work was carried out, most of the groups were classified as category D.

As a result of this combination, that is, the emergence of several journals and publication options, plus a limited number of research groups with poor qualifications in the National System, put pressure on the search for authors of accounting research products, both outside and within the editorial entities.

Contrary to what is usually the case with other disciplines and at least in the case of this publication, indexation has not generated an "avalanche" of unpublished work that could be classified as 1, 2, or 3 as established by Publindex's guidelines.

The breakthrough that indexation represents for a research and academic community such as that of professional accountants, have not yet come with an increase in the gross number of work that could be included in these scientific publications.

Curiously enough, this relative shortage of papers happens in the midst of a generally expanding community, in the midst of accountancy programs with ever increasing numbers of students, and a larger teaching staff working both full and part-time. This might indicate this growth's limited effect upon research work, at least of a formal type of research.

All those results in the production of not very specialized accountancy journals, which in turn find themselves having to resort to different topic matters in order to get a significant amount of papers and articles for a particular publication. This trend, if we make an a priori judgment, goes against the grain, at least in a world where more and more journals and journals on accountancy are being published.

What has been said above means that a series of strategies and proposals have to be designed for the benefit of the profession, the discipline, and the accounting national community and their scientific accountancy journals. Next you'll find some different proposals which are not mutually exclusive.

• To coordinate, with the help of research groups within each institution, the creation of relevant, timely, serious, and unpublished products. The idea, of course, is not to increase "production" as if producing staple material goods, but rather drafting academic management outlines that boost and foster the skills of the members of the existing accounting research groups in the country.

• To encourage the creation of work networks to improve conditions so that more and more quality accounting research projects are produced. Isolated individual efforts can be very expensive and not very productive in terms of new and better academic papers.

• To offer incentives to generate new papers derived from research work. In many cases the same one and only one paper is published in several journals and exhibited in different events with no restrictions whatsoever to this practice. Even if at times the latter practice can be justified, to delimit it is certainly desirable.

• To create journal alliances and networks. In practice, each institution would like to have its own publication as a matter of institutional "pride". In contrast, we rather propose that several universities and their respective research groups line up behind an indexed journal giving their academic and intellectual support.

• To explore the possibility of including work done abroad on accountancy. In very good measure, language limitations in turn limit the number of countries where work in the area could be looked for, thus, very active communities such as those in the USA, Britain, France, an Australia to name but a few, have not yet been incorporated to our journals. Much less, work done in emergent countries which in fact produce work on accountancy.

• Finally, we must focus and believe in the generation of work in the long term, and that means, for an academic community, to go for the education of undergraduate and graduate students of accountancy with skills enough to join research projects and then produce publishable material in the type of journal we are here talking about. Strategies such as student hotbeds, student journals, participation in local and national events are ways of to gradually identifying new potential authors of relevant work.

These strategies, though, cannot be understood as simple mechanisms and activities designed merely to increase the volume of work. In no case these efforts should imply a lowering of quality or a decrease in the social, professional, and disciplinary relevance of the work done. They should not, either, imply that the research groups, in their pursuit of increasing the production of work, run the risk of losing their identity.

Thus, our aim is to offer a quality intellectual product on accountancy that is not only relevant but in keeping with the different institutional identities and the publishing entities' demands. Such is the challenge and meaning of indexation at the service of the country's accounting community.

Gabriel Rueda-Delgado
Editor