An assessment of accounting journal quality based on departmental lists

Inevitably, the career success of academicians is partially dependent on the journals in which their manuscripts are published. Accordingly, knowledge of which journals are considered prestigious or of dubious quality is critical to an academician. Fortunately, several rankings of accounting journals have been published, providing insights to manuscript authors, and this study includes a discussion of several prior studies that have, by various methods, attempted to accurately compare the quality of accounting journals. Critically, however, this study also describes a survey of accredited business schools that submitted their departmental journal lists which were employed by those institutions in the assessment of faculty publications. Those departmental journal lists with multiple quality tiers were used to construct a journal ranking based on the evaluative, departmental reality faced by academicians rather than citation counts or expressed perceptions of journals. While the journal ranking of this study reveals consistency with many previous studies regarding the top five accounting journals, the study also indicates that departmental journal lists, which are reflective of the priorities of the schools that created them, often ascribe value to the diversity of journals that focus on specializations but not journals that are predominantly oriented toward accounting practitioners.