at Google ScholarTitle data
Federsel, Florian ; Fülbier, Rolf Uwe ; Seitz, Jan:
Research-Practice Gap in Accounting Journals? : A Topic Modeling Approach.
2022
Event: 44th European Accounting Association Annual Congress
, 11.-13. Mai 2022
, Bergen, Norwegen.
(Conference item: Conference
,
Paper
)
Abstract in another language
A gap between research and practice is commonly perceived throughout the accounting literature. However, empirical evidence on the magnitude of the detachment between research and practice remains scarce. This study contributes to the ongoing debate by introducing a novel topic-based approach to capture the research-practice gap and quantify its extent. The unsupervised machine learning approach Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) allows us to compare the topical composition of 2,251 articles of six premier research, practice, and bridging journals from the U.S. and Europe from 2009 to 2019. Our results substantiate the previously suspected existence of a research-practice gap and document its statistical significance. Additional analyses uncover that the research-practice gap is more pronounced for the U.S. than Europe, highlighting the importance of regional circumstances and traditions when considering the distance between research and practice. The results are robust to various alternative specifications of the LDA model and additional statistical tests.