A review of accounting research in internationalising journals in the South African region

The accounting academic community in South Africa is characterised by a teaching focus rather than a research focus (Samkin & Schneider 2014b; Venter & de Villiers 2013), which has hindered efforts to link with the international research community. South African accounting academics tend to publish in South African journals. However, universities are increasingly expecting accounting academics to fulfil their research obligations and publish in international journals, which are seen to be better quality compared to local journals (Samkin & Schneider 2014a). A number of South African journals have started to internationalise their journals by, for instance, aspiring to be included in international journal lists, such as Scopus. This review reflects upon the state of accounting research as exemplified by articles published by internationalising South African journals, contrasted with the premier local accounting journal.


Introduction
The accounting academic community in South Africa is characterised by a teaching focus rather than a research focus (Samkin & Schneider 2014b;Venter & de Villiers 2013), which has hindered efforts to link with the international research community.South African accounting academics tend to publish in South African journals.However, universities are increasingly expecting accounting academics to fulfil their research obligations and publish in international journals, which are seen to be better quality compared to local journals (Samkin & Schneider 2014a).A number of South African journals have started to internationalise their journals by, for instance, aspiring to be included in international journal lists, such as Scopus.This review reflects upon the state of accounting research as exemplified by articles published by internationalising South African journals, contrasted with the premier local accounting journal.
This study assesses South African journals (defined in this study as scientific journals on the South African Department of Higher Education and Training journal list) which publish accounting research (defined in this study as journals that have published at least four accounting articles in 2015 and 2016).While the focus is placed on internationalising journals (defined in this study as being on Scopus), the premier local accounting journal is analysed for a more comprehensive assessment of accounting research and to provide a point of comparison.The four international journals to be identified by following the assessment criteria were Investment http://www.sajems.orgOpen Access Analysts Journal (IAJ), Meditari Accountancy Research (MedAR), South African Journal of Business Management (SAJBM) and South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences (SAJEMS).The local accounting journal, South African Journal of Accounting Research (SAJAR), is assessed because of its status as the premier South African accounting journal among South African accounting academics.An overview of the journals is provided in Appendix 1, which includes the year of first issue, editor, 2015 Scopus citation statistics, overall and 2012 to present h-index, 1 2016 ABCD rating and current statement of 'Aims and Scope'.It should be noted that, although the focus is on accounting research, these journals publish papers from diverse management fields.
MedAR and SAJAR primarily focus on accounting research, IAJ focuses on finance and investments, with SAJBM and SAJEMS having a broader, general business, remit.These differences are also evident from the types of articles published in each journal, which will be discussed in the findings section.An inspection of the journals' h-indexes in Appendix 1 provides an early indication that articles published in the internationalising journals are cited more than articles published in SAJAR.
This study is based on a similar study of accounting research in Asia-Pacific journals (Benson et al. 2015).Following Benson et al. (2015), modified where appropriate, this paper analyses the most cited papers in each of the five journals, as measured by total citations and by citations per year (total citations divided by the number of years since publication).In addition to the characteristics examined by Benson et al. (2015), this study provides an overview of the non-accounting publications, details of what is published in the journals, summarises the relevance to practice of the articles, provides more detail on the research methods applied and summarises the universities that feature prominently in published articles in these journals.
The findings of this study should be of interest to universities in their efforts to manage the research output of their accounting academics, and may also hold policy implications related to government efforts to promote research at universities.In addition, journal editors and authors who are interested in maximising the impact of their research and being cited, will be interested in the findings.

Most frequently cited articles
Google Scholar data and the ABDC journal rankings were used to measure the impact of accounting articles; this is consistent with studies such as Benson et al. (2015) and Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft (2009).Google Scholar includes all citations in scientific sources, such as journals, books, theses, etc.By contrast, other sources of citation statistics, such as Scopus and Web of Science, limit their citations statistics to references made in the journals on their lists.Google Scholar provides the most comprehensive coverage of scientific publications 1.A journal's h-index reflects the number of articles published in the journal (h), which has been cited at least h number of times.Therefore, a higher h-index reflects higher overall citations.
and is therefore considered appropriate for the purpose of this study.Citation counts were drawn from Google Scholar on 7 July 2017, using the software program Harzing's Publish or Perish.Citations per year for each article are calculated as the total number of citations for the paper divided by (2017 less the year of publication).
Table 1, Panel A, lists the 10 most frequently cited articles, measured by total citations, published in each journal over its history.This is followed by Panel B listing the most frequently cited articles measured by citations per year, measured as total citations divided by number of years since publication.
In situations where there is no clear cut-off, all papers with the same number of citations, or citations per year, are included.
SAJBM has the highest mean total citation for their top 10 cited articles, followed by MedAR, SAJEMS and IAJ.Note that SAJBM on 148.80 is far ahead of the three journals in the middle, which are bunched together between 46 and 61, with SAJAR lagging behind on 23 MedAR has the highest mean citations per year for their top 10 cited articles, followed by SAJBM, SAJEMS, IAJ and finally SAJAR.However, it should be noted that the difference between the internationalising journals' averages are relatively small, with SAJAR lagging behind.
Note that many of the most cited papers per year were published in 2015 or later.This may be because these journals are internationalising and therefore their articles are being noticed and cited more frequently of late.If this trend continues, these journals' citation statistics should benefit in future.This is also true for SAJAR, but apart from Raemaekers et al. (2016), none of the other papers would have made it onto the list if it was published in one of the other journals.MedAR has the highest number of citations for articles published during 2015-2016, with the other journals lagging far behind.As mentioned before, a high level of citations for recent articles bodes well for future citations.It is worth noting that articles published in the journals that do not have 'South African' in their names are cited more often.Journal names may be indicative of their strategic stance towards integration with the international research community and internationalisation strategies may be increasing the attention of the international research community on articles published in journals with an internationalisation strategy.

Relative role of accounting research
All papers published during 2015-2016, within the five journals were classified into a management field.Multidisciplinary studies were categorised according to their dominant focus, which results in papers being classified under a single category.The classification is based on the keywords listed by the author(s), the stated purpose of the paper, the references cited and the academic department of the author(s).
Table 3 shows the subject area of articles published in each journal during 2015-2016.
Among these five journals, the main sources of accounting research are MedAR and SAJAR.Each journal has a unique focus in terms of subject area(s), based on articles published during 2015-2016, with IAJ being finance oriented, MedAR and SAJAR accounting, SAJBM management and SAJEMS being economics and management oriented.MedAR and SAJAR are most focused on accounting, as can be expected from the inclusion of the word 'accounting/accountancy' in these journals' titles and the emphasis on accounting research in their stated objectives.
Table 4 shows the accounting research (2015-2016) classified according to ScholarOne manuscript submission categories.
As can be expected for refereed journals, research paper is the most common classification.Accounting and Information Systems (IS): Esterhuyse and Wingard (2016) assess the extent companies listed on the JSE comply with international best practice guidelines for investor relations practices based on analysis of corporate website contents.

Accounting Education (ED):
There is a focus on enhancing the learning experience of accounting students and implementing methods of teaching to better prepare accounting students for their professional career.Sugahara et al. (2016) investigate the impact of a new interactive form of teaching on the learning motivation and performance on accounting undergraduate students in Japan.Stainbank and Gurr (2016) study whether accounting students in South Africa find social networking sites useful for their learning.Viviers, Fouché and Reitsma (2016) evaluate the usefulness of an educational game to develop soft skills.Van Oordt and Mulder (2016) describe the consequences of implementing basic e-learning tools in an undergraduate taxation curriculum.Kirstein and Kunz (2015) report on the development and implementation of two student-centred approaches, suggesting active student participation in large classes are possible and develops professional skills.Barac et al. (2016)    Management Accounting (MA): Morris (2015) investigates the movement in human capital efficiency of the workers of South African listed companies over time.Alkaraan (2016) focuses on strategic management accounting and examines the strategic investment decision-making processes of a case company.
Social and Environmental (SE): The process of developing environmental and social disclosures, or assessment of such reports, is a common focus.Del Sordo et al. ( 2016) analyse the contents disclosed in the social reports of Italian state universities' and discusses their motivations and difficulties faced.Massa et al. (2015) discusses the mechanisms and consequences involved in developing a sustainability report for a small to medium enterprise.Leung and Gray (2016) explore the relevance of social responsibility and social and environmental reporting to controversial industries.Borghei, Leung and Guthrie (2016) explore voluntary greenhouse gas disclosures after the introduction of the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 and before the introduction of the Australian ETS.Stent and Dowler (2015) assess the gap between current corporate reporting and integrated reporting principles.Other topics include investigating the role of moral philosophy and ethics in CSR activities and disclosure (Ackers 2015), whether Buddhism is informing the sustainability practices of corporations in Sri Lanka (Abeydeera, Tregidga & Kearins 2016), the moderating effect of cultural dimensions on the relation between environmental and social disclosures and profitability (Khlif et al. 2015), and emergence of integrated private reporting (Atkins et al. 2015).Yoo and Nam (2015) proposed an accounting framework to provide information on both financial information of a focal firm and stakeholder relationships.Rao and Tilt (2016) examine the relationship between board diversity and CSR reporting.Maroun (2015a) discusses key limitations to meta-analyses that assess the correlation between corporate social environmental disclosures and financial measures.Other: Researchers have investigated into accounting for the Bitcoin (Ram, Maroun & Garnett 2016), frameworks used to examine fraud (Free 2015), power exerted by accountants on small enterprises (Stone 2015), earnings management (Liu 2016;Pududu & de Villiers 2016), gender in accounting (Broadbent 2016;Galizzi & Siboni 2016;Siboni et al. 2016;Zhao & Lord 2016), analysis of performance or publications of academic journals (Murphy & Maguire 2015;Ngulube & Ngulube 2015), central banks with private shareholders (Rossouw 2016), accounting historiography (Parker 2015), theory of autopoiesis and its association with sustainability (Khan & Gray 2016), the legitimacy of the International Financial Reporting Standards (Wingard, Bosman & Amisi 2016) and review of the use of Hofstede's cultural dimensions in accounting research (Khlif 2016).A common contribution stated by studies is extending the current literature by improving research methodology, such as considering analysis of additional variables for a particular research topic or extended time periods or databases (Marcia et al. 2015;Taljaard et al. 2015;Ryu et al. 2016).Studies also express addressing knowledge gaps in current literature (Barac et al. 2016;Huang et al. 2015;Leung & Gray 2016), and develop theories (Ram et al. 2016).Suggestions for future research are also common (Free 2015;Siboni et al. 2016).

Relevance to practice
A few studies are targeted at practitioners.Research that may be relevant to the accounting profession includes those that investigated into whistle-blowing in the audit profession (Soni et al. 2015), relationship between accountants and small businesses (Stone 2015), and suggested the need to develop education regarding non-financial performance and assurance (Ackers 2015).For investors, there have been suggestions for improvements in investment analysis methods (Liu 2016), and indication of factors to consider for in the appointment of a CEO (Mey & de Klerk 2015).
Studies relevant to managers are those, for instance, related to identifying aspects or factors to consider to improve corporate disclosures (Atkins & Maroun 2015), corporate policies (Khlif et al. 2015), and corporate governance (Willows & van der Linde 2016).
For educators, studies have suggested the use of technology and social media as beneficial for student learning (Stainbank & Gurr 2016, van Oordt & Mulder 2016) and implementation of innovative and student-focused teaching styles (Kirstein & Kunz 2015, Viviers et al. 2016).
Articles targeted at contributing to policy or standard development includes Zhao and Lord (2016) who calls for enforcement of employment laws to support equal opportunity rights for women accountants in China, Stent and Dowler (2015) who developed an integrated reporting checklist and systems thinking proposal which could be used in assessing the potential and the additional requirements integrated reporting will impose on corporate reporting, and Lin et al. (2016) assessed the impact of introducing the limitorder book change event which may be considered by similar markets to Taiwan.
Articles classified under other are those that did not specifically state their contribution or are difficult to group into the other categories; for instance, Wingard et al. (2016) question the legitimacy of the International Financial Reporting Standard, Broadbent (2016) argues for reform towards a broader diversity agenda in the accounting profession, and Murphy and Maguire (2015) evaluate the future potential of MedAR.

Most prolific authors
The most prolific authors and institutions cover all individuals who published in the five journals and are not limited to those that published accounting articles.For each paper, all individual authors and institutions were counted to have one publication even when papers may involve multiple authors and institutions.in total and the number of these articles that were classified in each of the subject areas.The most prolific accounting author, by far, was Warren Maroun.

Conclusion
This study identifies four South African journals that publish accounting research articles, journals that are also internationalising, as shown by their inclusion in Scopus.The four journals are IAJ, MedAR, SAJBM and SAJEMS.These journals are contrasted with the premier South African accounting journal, SAJAR.The study's analyses show that many of the highly cited articles have been published during or since 2015.This may be indicative of the international community starting to notice and cite work from these journals and if this trend continues, future citation statistics will benefit.Thus, these journals show signs of success in their efforts to internationalise.The citations of SAJAR lag behind those of the four internationalising journals, providing evidence that reliance on a largely South African support base, without tapping into the international accounting  research community, leads to the maintenance of a stagnant position, whereas internationalising journals are moving ahead.The fact that SAJAR's board appears to be dominated by non-academics and non-researchers (e.g. the editor in chief) can be taken as a signal that the journal has no interest in integrating with the international research community.
Each journal publishes articles that cover different subject area(s), with IAJ publishing mostly finance, MedAR and SAJAR publishing mostly accounting, SAJBM mostly management, and SAJEMS mostly economics and management.When considering accounting research only, accounting education and social and environmental accounting are popular focus areas.By contrast, taxation, the public sector, and management accounting are not well represented among published articles during 2015-2016 in these five journals.Accounting articles claim to contribute in different ways, with about half claiming to contribute to the accounting literature, and much smaller percentages claiming to contribute to management, policy-making, and practice.The most prolific authors and most prominent universities make for interesting reading and, to some extent, follow the most popular subject areas.For example, Warren Maroun, who does social and environmental research, is the most prolific accounting author, and his university, the University of the Witwatersrand, features strongly.Large proportions of authors of 2015-2016 articles are from outside of Africa, which can again be taken as evidence of success in the internationalisation efforts of the four internationalising journals.
Overall, the evidence points towards IAJ and MedAR being more successful in their internationalisation efforts and reaping the benefits of more articles by non-African authors and increased citations for published papers.Having 'South African' in the name of a journal appears to work against efforts to internationalise, or otherwise it may be reflective of an underlying editorial philosophy to remain true to the initial target audience of the journal and not to aggressively pursue a strategy to internationalise.Journal editors and authors who would like their research to make an impact and be cited will be interested in these findings.
reported corporate governance disclosure on the financial performance of companies listed on the Taxation (TX):Maroun (2015b) assesses section 24JB of the Income Tax Act No. 58 of 1962 and the International Financial Reporting Standards 9, suggesting potential for dysfunctional consequences following adoption of a fair value taxation regime for financial instruments.Junpath, Kharwa and Stainbank (2016) surveyed taxpayers regarding their attitudes towards tax amnesties and tax compliance.

Table 2
lists the 10 most frequently cited articles published during 2015-2016 for each journal, measured by total number of citations.Where fewer articles are listed for a journal, this is because fewer than ten articles have been cited.Where more than 10 articles are listed for a journal, this is because more than one article has been cited the same number of times around the cut-off of 10 articles.

TABLE 1 :
Most frequently cited articles in each journal.

TABLE 1 (Continues...): Most frequently cited articles in each journal. Panel Journal Authors Year Title Citations Per year Total
http://www.sajems.orgOpenAccess

TABLE 3 :
Management field of articles published during the period 2015-2016.
IAJ, Investment Analysts Journal; MedAR, Meditari Accountancy Research; SAJBM, South African Journal of Business Management; SAJEMS, South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; SAJAR, South African Journal of Accounting Research.

TABLE 4 :
Article classifications of accounting articles 2015-2016.MedAR, Meditari Accountancy Research; SAJBM, South African Journal of Business Management; SAJEMS, South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; SAJAR, South African Journal of Accounting Research.

TABLE 5 :
Hay (2015).(2015)tegories: 2015-2016 articles.Auditing (AU):Soni et al. (2015)applies organisational justice theory in examining variations in the tendency for trainee auditors in South Africa to whistle blow on a leader's internal misconduct.Hay (2015)reviews literature to identify current issues in auditing research.
IAJ, Investment Analysts Journal; MedAR, Meditari Accountancy Research; SAJBM, South African Journal of Business Management; SAJEMS, South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; SAJAR, South African Journal of Accounting Research..
Table 6 shows the stated contributions of the 2015-2016 articles.Papers may have specified multiple contributions.If so, the papers are coded in multiple categories.
IAJ, Investment Analysts Journal; MedAR, Meditari Accountancy Research; SAJBM, South African Journal of Business Management; SAJEMS, South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; SAJAR, South African Journal of Accounting Research.http://www.sajems.orgOpen Access

Table 9
lists universities with more than five papers published in the five journals during 2015-2016.The University of Pretoria and the University of the Witwatersrand feature prominently in terms of accounting articles.Most of the universities listed are South African, except the University of Bologna (Italy).

Table 10
IAJ and MedAR have the lowest percentages of published authors from Africa, reflecting a greater level of internationalisation than the other two internationalising journals, SAJBM and SAJEMS.SAJAR appears to be very parochial, mostly publishing articles by African authors.These latter journals declare themselves as South African in their titles and this may have a bearing on the efforts of SAJBM and SAJEMS to internationalise, whereas SAJAR may not be interested in the international research community at all.

TABLE 10 :
Geographical regions of published authors.