Do We Matter? The Attention Policy Makers, Academics, and the General Public Give to Accounting Research

Many question the value of accounting scholarship to society. We compared the attention the general public, policy makers, and academics give to academic accounting research relative to other business disciplines and other more general disciplines (economics, psychology, and other sciences). The results indicate that accounting research receives significantly less attention from the general public than all other disciplines and also performs relatively poorly in receiving policy makers' attention compared to both economics and finance. Articles in other disciplines' elite journals cite relatively little of accounting's elite-level publications, but non-elite journal articles cite accounting research in similar numbers to other disciplines. We also compared the attention subtopic areas within accounting receive. Within accounting, tax research receives more attention from the general public and policy makers than other topic areas. Finally, we rank scholars, institutions, and journals by the attention they receive. We discuss how these findings could impact accounting education