A Bibliometric Analysis of the AIS Educator Journal

The AIS Educator Journal (AISEJ) has published articles on accounting information systems (AIS) education for the past 15 years. During that time, technological advances accelerated, and accounting, auditing, and related professions increased their reliance on systems and technology. Thus, systems knowledge and technology skills have become expected in accounting graduates, and accounting programs have increased those components in their curricula. Business and accounting accreditation standard-setters expect commensurately increased depth and breadth of systems and technology coverage.

We provide an overview of the body of work published in the journal in its first 15 years, an analysis of the authors and their origins, a ranking of employers, doctoral institutions, and individual authors by journal article output, and a topical analysis of the articles. This study offers the first bibliometric analysis for AISEJ. Future authors can identify topics and potential co-authors with similar interests. We hope our history of AISEJ will pique the interest of AIS educators and researchers. The topical analysis can highlight areas of interest and a need for future papers to align with changing business and accreditation standards.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we assess the role and importance of AISEJ as an outlet for accounting information systems research; then, we present a summary of literature examining accounting journals. Next, we explain our method. Findings then follow. The last section provides conclusions, limitations, and areas for further study.

We believe AISEJ is of increasing importance to AIS educators. Chiu et al. (2019) present research methodology and topical area analysis for 681 articles published in the six leading AIS journals from 2004 to 2016. One of their findings is that, among the 77 AIS education studies published between 2004-2016, 46 were in AISEJ (12 in 2004-2008, 22 in 2009-2013, and 12 in 2014-2016), 21 were in the Journal of Information Systems (20 in 2004-2008 and 1 in 2009-2013), and 10 were in the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA) (1 in 2009-2013 and 9 in 2014-2016). Our analysis concludes that AISEJ is a leading outlet for AIS education research.

Studies of accounting and AIS journal publications that rank accounting programs, institutions, and faculty productivity appear periodically in the academic accounting literature. Coyne et al. (2010) analyze accounting research programs by publication counts in top journals (Accounting, Organizations, and Society; Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory; Behavioral Research in Accounting; Contemporary Accounting Research; Journal of Accounting and Economics; Journal of Accounting Research; Journal of the American Taxation Association, Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Management Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, and The Accounting Review) between 1990 and 2009. The study also ranks accounting programs by topical area and research methodology.

In the AIS literature specifically, Daigle and Arnold (2000) analyze AIS research and rank faculty and institutional productivity based on papers published in 45 accounting and information systems journals. The study identified scholars with the most AIS research published and the doctoral-granting institutions and employing institutions with the highest-ranked AIS research productivity from 1982 to 1998.

Other AIS studies analyze specific AIS journal’s output and rankings of article citations, researchers, and institutions. O’Leary (2009) analyzes JETA publications and ranks the top-cited JETA publications in the prior five years. He also compares the top-cited JETA publications between 2009 and 2011 (O’Leary, 2011). Guffey and Harp (2014) rank institutions, accounting programs, and faculty by citations using research articles published in the Journal of Information Systems from 1986 to 2010. Muehlmann et al. (2015) analyze JETA publications from 2004 to 2013 by topical area, contributing authors, institutions, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) A7 data terms, and article citations. Chiu et al. (2019) extend that study by examining a subset of six AIS journals’ content with 681 publications. Their analysis focuses on research methodology, topical area, and inclusion of emerging technologies.

In AIS education specifically, Bernardi and Collins (2018) provide faculty productivity rankings and institutional rankings of authors who published AIS and technology papers in 16 accounting education journals between 1992-2015. Bernardi and Collins (2019) rank accounting programs by their accounting education publications from 1993 to 2017, considering journal quality, researcher’s doctoral time, and PhD/DBA degree held. Overall, the literature has established the importance of periodically reviewing accomplishments in accounting and AIS publications and authorship. These studies offer valuable information on the research productivity of accounting and AIS academics and could be helpful in institutions’ tenure and promotion processes. For example, faculty might show their rank relative to colleagues publishing in a journal. Also, employer institutions can use information about highly ranked authors to establish their quality.

As described by Liu et al. (2021), bibliometric analysis uses quantitative techniques, such as content analysis, citation, and co-citation analyses, which describe various aspects of scientific publications (Renaud & Maucuer 2018). Vasarhelyi et al. (1988), Wilkin and Chenhall (2010), Ferguson and Seow (2011). Chiu et al. (2014) and Chiu et al. (2019) have used bibliometric analysis to describe essential characteristics of articles in a specific field or subfield of accounting, such as to rank accounting programs (Coyne et al. 2010) and to analyze citations of a particular journal or journals (Lindquist & Smith 2009; Muehlmann et al. 2015; Guffey & Harp 2017; Ardianto & Anridho 2018). Similarly, we apply author and content analysis here to AISEJ articles to understand how they represent AIS education and AIS educators.

We examine the output of the AIS Educator Journal during its 15-year history, provide insight into the articles and the authors, and rank the employing institutions, doctoral institutions, and authors by the volume of articles published in the journal. Cabell’s Directory indexes AISEJ, and the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) includes it in its Master Journal List. Each article has a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI), providing a unique and persistent web link to the scholarly work. AISEJ is an integral part of the corpus of AIS research, particularly as it applies to education.

Bibliometric analysis applies statistical techniques to bibliographic data. This study focuses on content analysis. We collected bibliographic data about each article published in AISEJ from the journal website, including each author’s name, affiliation, author type (academic faculty, practicing professional, or student), the article title, and the abstract. We also recorded the number and order of authors. We identified each paper’s topic, including any AACSB Accounting Standard A5 parts or data tools included.

We identified each author’s doctoral institution (or determined that the author had not earned a doctorate) and recorded whether it was in accounting or some other field. We also identified the authors’ gender using online searches. We classified authors by type (academic, practitioner, and student) and gender.

We classified articles into two categories: emerging technology (ET) articles contained topics that were either named in Gartner’s (2016) hype cycle or identified as such in either Chiu et al. (2019) or Liu et al. (2021); we placed all other articles in a traditional AIS category. ET articles dealt with, for example, XBRL taxonomy mapping, continuous auditing, artificial intelligence, continuous auditing or monitoring, digital reporting, big data, blockchain, data analytics, data mining, internet technologies (such as crowdsourcing), informatics, textual analysis, text mining, cloud computing, decision support or group support systems, educational technology tools, SysTrust, WebTrust, and XML.

Accounting Standard A5 (AACSB 2018) mentions many of these ET topics. Examples of non-ET (traditional AIS) topics include general systems, enterprise resource planning, and expert systems. Chiu et al. (2019) note that some technologies are emerging, then they emerge, and eventually become common elements of AIS (at which point they are no longer discussed as emerging technologies, separate from AIS in general). An example is expert systems, often discussed during the 1990s as a separate (emerging technology) topic but now considered a common AIS element.

We also identified articles that addressed specific elements of Accounting Standard A5 (AACSB 2018), which include 1) information systems related data terms, such as data creation, data storage, data management, data reporting, and data assurance, 2) data analytics-related data terms, separated into data manipulation (preprocessing) and data analysis (processing), and 3) mindset (technology agility). During classification, the authors reviewed each article’s abstract, and sometimes the entire text, and assigned the appropriate data term. We classified articles covering all the data terms as “general.” We cross-checked the classification results and held extensive discussions regarding any disagreements until we reached a consensus.

We also identified articles that used specific data tools and classified them by the tools used (Excel, GoldSim, IDEA, Microsoft Access, and Tableau). Finally, we classified the articles by accounting area (AIS, auditing, financial, managerial, and general).

We counted equal authorship (an article with three authors would yield one authorship for each author) without adjusting for the number of authors (using weighted articles did not significantly change the results). We used these counts to rank authors, their doctoral institutions, and their employing institutions.

This section presents results, starting with the overall journal and article descriptions, then discussing the institutions, employers, doctoral programs, and individual authors. The journal has published 62 articles in its first 15 years, an average of 4.13 per year. The numbers of authors and articles over the past 15 years appear in Table 1 below.

Most articles published in the AISEJ include traditional AIS education topics. Some of them, however, are more narrowly focused on ETs. We show these two categories of article focus in Table 2.

Many articles address various aspects of AIS discussed in Accounting Accreditation Standard A5 (AACSB 2018). Authors indicated the inclusion of A5 elements by mentioning them in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. If the classification(s) applicable were not apparent from those items, the authors examined the whole article.

Table 3 lists these terms from the most to least common, showing the number of articles associated with each (the total is greater than 62 because some articles address more than one term).

Only five AISEJ articles relate to one specific software tool, suggesting that most articles address AIS concepts rather than a particular software application. The five tools covered (each in a separate article) are Microsoft Excel, GoldSim, CaseWare IDEA, Microsoft Access, and Tableau.

AIS is mentioned or directly addressed in almost every article. Table 4 lists the accounting areas for those that only mention AIS (the first row) and those that mention AIS in conjunction with another area of accounting.

The AIS focus of the journal is clear. The second most common accounting area mentioned is auditing. The three other accounting areas were each represented in less than five percent of the journal’s articles.

Table 5 shows the author types represented in the journal.

Most of the authors published in the journal are academicians. Faculty are the journal’s primary target audience and the primary source of articles. Student authors are mostly doctoral candidates.

Table 6 shows the gender distribution of AISEJ articles and authorships.

The gender distribution of articles and authorships is almost the same. As shown in Table 6, 55% of authors are male, and 45% are female. The difference when counting articles versus authorships is only one percent. This gender balance compares favorably to other AIS-focused journals, which have much lower percentages of female authorship. Our examination of a similar period for International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, International Journal of Digital Accounting Research, and the accounting articles published in Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance, and Management, yielded much lower percentages of authorship by women (ranging from 19% to 37%).

We ranked authors by number of authorships (the number of articles on which an author is a co-author), a metric also known as author lines. Table 7 shows this metric for all authors and articles (authors who have only co-authored one article do not appear in the table for conciseness).

We show authorships for general AIS articles and ET articles in Table 8.

Table 9 lists authors’ employing academic institutions in total and separately according to the focus of the article as AIS in general or emerging technologies.

AISEJ authors work at a diverse set of academic institutions in the United States, including many that are teaching-oriented or teaching/research-balanced (80%). These institutions range in size (small, medium, large) and focus (doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s focused) according to their Carnegie classifications. What seems clear from this analysis is that AISEJ publishes articles on various AIS-related topics from colleagues at different types of institutions. Only two authors held positions outside the United States. Both were working in Singapore. We are not surprised at the journal’s lack of international diversity since it is based in the United States, and its annual conference is always held there. We note this as a potential growth area for the journal.

The doctoral education of authors was, similarly, not internationally diverse. Table 10 shows the country of doctoral education for all authors holding doctorates.

We further note that all doctorates held by authors were from institutions in English-speaking countries. Again, we do not find this surprising, given the location of the sponsoring association’s annual conference.

We identified the disciplines of doctoral degrees held by authors and summarize the data in Table 11.

As one might expect, accounting is the most common doctoral discipline of AIS education researchers. We were, however, surprised by the wide range of other doctorates represented.

Table 12 provides the breakdown of author lines generated by author doctoral institution for all majors and accounting majors only (authors not holding a doctoral degree had 21 author lines, which we do not include in the table).

We also calculated author lines for accounting doctoral institutions (only) by type of article. Table 13 shows author lines of accounting doctorate holders for traditional AIS and ET articles.

Most articles are traditional AIS, which we found reasonable given the journal’s central theme. However, the first four programs at the top of the AIS articles list do not appear on the ET articles list. We conclude that some doctoral programs focus more on the AIS discipline than on more volatile ET topics and that doctoral programs might now train or inspire some graduates to do AIS or ET education research. We contrast this with the conjecture that most AIS researchers learned their AIS skills somewhere other than their doctoral program (Daigle & Arnold 2000). Our findings do, however, comport with the experience of all three authors of this study, whose doctoral programs included significant AIS components (at Rutgers and Virginia Tech).

This study provides an overview and bibliometric analysis of the articles published in the AIS Educator Journal between 2006 and 2020, its first 15 years. It identifies the primary focus of these publications in terms of traditional AIS and ET contributions, accounting areas, and AACSB A5 data terms. It also analyzes author data to recognize prominent authors, their affiliated institutions, and their educational backgrounds.

The primary contribution of this study is an in-depth analysis of the journal’s publications from various perspectives. Our results could also help identify areas of needed research. Prospective faculty should find the information helpful in identifying AIS-friendly employer institutions. Finally, future doctoral students might find this information useful in identifying AIS-friendly doctoral programs.

We conclude that the journal focuses primarily on traditional AIS topics and mainly contributes to AIS- and auditing-related courses, which suggests areas for future additional growth beyond the AIS and accounting courses. Growth in emerging technologies is possible, as are articles on topics identified in AACSB Accounting Standard A5. These topics fit well into AIS courses and could be an area for future research.

Commonly discussed topics in these articles include providing assurance services on financial data, developing students’ analytical mindset, and creating high-quality accounting data using AIS. Not many articles have applied analytical tools, whereas the few tools introduced in these articles cover a range of commonly used software. Future articles may address broader settings for developing students’ technology agility or applying data analytics tools.

Author analysis reveals that most of the contributing authors are academicians, which is consistent with the nature of the journal. The existence of practitioner authors demonstrates accounting professionals’ desire and enthusiasm to participate in and contribute to AIS education. The most prominent author of the journal is David C. Hayes, the main contributing author of traditional AIS topics. The most prominent ET author is Clinton E. White, Jr. Most AISEJ authors tend to publish in either traditional AIS or ET areas; only a few have AIS and ET publications in AISEJ. Most AISEJ authors hold accounting or information systems doctoral degrees; others have diverse education, engineering, and management backgrounds.

In the journal, the top university employer affiliated with AIS authors is James Madison University, and the institution most prominently affiliated with ET authors is the University of Delaware. The largest number of AIS authors hold doctoral degrees from the University of South Florida, and most of the ET authors hold doctoral degrees from Indiana University and Virginia Tech.

This article shows how to use bibliometrics and author analysis to analyze accounting literature. Future research can extend the analysis by including citations and other related variables, such as editorships and editorial boards, applicable accounting courses, or detailed descriptions of the articles and their topics.

Future research could examine the gender findings more deeply and compare them to related publishing outlets. Potential research questions include: What drives this disparity? Are more females engaging in pedagogical research versus discipline-based studies? Does the mentoring culture that the AIS Educators Association provides attract more females to become involved? Given our society’s views on diversity and inclusiveness, the gender of authors is an area that begs for future research.

A limitation of this study is its narrow focus on one journal. A comparison study of this journal and AIS education articles published in related journals could also identify further areas needing more research and compare the characteristics of AIS education articles across journals.

This study does not include citation analysis, another form of bibliometric analysis. Future research could fill this gap and show how research on AIS education is cited and disseminated through the literature.