A long-term bibliometric analysis of journals influencing management accounting and control research

Abstract

This paper explores which journals publish management accounting research and which sources are most cited in these journals. We apply bibliometric methods based on citation data from Web of Science and Scopus. Quantitatively, we examined the boundaries of management accounting by analysing 506,753 and 1,075,838 cited references from each respective database in the timespans 1945–2018 and 1960–2018 and found that the five most cited journals represent 6.5% and 4.7% of the total citations. The most cited journal in both Web of Science and Scopus is AOS, followed by MAR. The findings are discussed in light of diversity, and the article will claim that the boundaries of management accounting research are not subject to severe constraints. Google Scholar was initially chosen alongside Web of Science and Scopus, but, among other challenges, Google Scholar does not provide comparable citation data. Therefore, issues concerning using citation data and databases are also thoroughly discussed.