The objective in this study was to identify what characteristics of the papers published in Brazilian accounting journals are associated with their resonance in scientific production. A theoretical-empirical approach and a quantitative design were adopted. The strategy was a survey and data collection used the content analysis of the individual search results of each article in Google Scholar. The sample consisted of 577 articles, published between 2006 and 2011 in the four journals ranked highest in Qualis/CAPES 2012: Contabilidade Vista & Revista, Revista Contabilidade & Financas, Revista de Contabilidade e Organizacoes and Revista Universo Contabil. In total, 1,655 records were ranked in an electronic worksheet, with 1,372 citations and 283 articles that were not cited. Chi-squared and correspondence analyses were used, besides the calculation of the journals’ impact factor. The findings demonstrated a mean number of 2.38 citations per article and 49.05% of the articles that were not cited. Associations were found between journal, year of publication and language of the articles and citations received per citation vehicle, as well as between the language of the article and the country of the citation. Articles published in RC&F received 66.33% of the citations, as the most important journal to explain the data variability. The highest impact factor in 2011 was found for RC&F (0.861), followed by CVISTA (0.667), RCO (0.458) and UNIVERSO (0.458), with a general average of 0.578. In conclusion, the resonance of the scientific production under analysis can be considered low, the data variability is related to the characteristics of the articles/journals and the distance among the journals’ impact factors has decreased.