A citation analysis of the top-ranked management and financial accounting journals

Academic journals focusing on specialised areas of accounting have proliferated in recent years. This has increased attention to identifying the top specialty journals to assist faculty performance evaluation. While several recent studies have identified highly consistent sets of top-ranked journals in management and financial accounting, all have relied on perception surveys and as such, are vulnerable to judgement and other biases. This study triangulates these prior findings by analysing the top-ranked specialty journals' citation patterns. It further examines the distribution of highly-cited articles across these journals, and uses this as a springboard for discussing the potential drawbacks of using journal rankings in evaluating publication performance.