Freeman tops in managerial/ experimental accounting

A new study ranks Tulane University’s A. B. Freeman School of Business No. 1 in the world in managerial-experimental accounting. The study, which is based on  number of faculty citations in respected accounting journals, also rates faculty members Lynn Hannan and Jasmijn Bol as among the world’s top 25 scholars in the field of experimental accounting.

Co-authored by researchers at Brigham Young and Lehigh universities, the study is the first to present citation-based rankings disaggregated by topic and methodology. Unlike publication-count rankings, which measure institutional and individual productivity, citation-based rankings provide a measurement of research impact, an important factor in evaluating overall scholarly excellence.

Between 2009 and 2014, managerial-experimental accounting researchers cited works by Freeman School professors 295 times, more than any other business school. Freeman also ranks in the top 10 for the period 1990 to 2014, with 676 citations for an overall ranking of ninth.

“Producing high-impact business knowledge is part of our institutional mission, so it’s tremendously gratifying to see in objective terms that we’re achieving this objective,” said Ira Solomon, dean of the Freeman School. “I’m very proud of the work our accounting faculty is doing, and based on what I’ve seen, I think we’ll be seeing even more impressive accomplishments from them in the future.”

In addition to institutional rankings, the authors also published a second paper with rankings of individual accounting faculty members based on citations. Hannan, the Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting at the Freeman School, ranked third on the list of managerial-experimental scholars, eighth on the list of accounting researchers who use experimental methods and 32nd on the list of managerial accounting scholars. Bol, associate professor and PricewaterhouseCoopers Faculty Fellow in Accounting, ranked ninth on the list of managerial-experimental scholars and 25th on the list of experimental scholars.

The two papers, Accounting Institution Citation-Based Research Rankings by Topical Area and Methodology and Citation-Based Benchmarks and Individual Accounting Faculty Research Rankings by Topical Area and Methodology, co-authored by Garrison Nuttall, Scott L. Summers and David A. Wood of Brigham Young University and Neal Snow of Lehigh University, were published in September 2015 via the Social Science Research Network.