
I argue that academic research in accounting has strayed from producing work that is useful to either practitioners or policy makers. I use three criteria to arrive at that assessment: (i) How many products and processes have accounting research produced in the last 50 years? (ii) How much overlap do we observe between issues that Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) worry about and our published research? (iii) Is the science or the knowhow in academe in a particular area ahead of that in practice? I conjecture that tuition-funded research drives this problem. I review several initiatives that have been tried at Columbia and elsewhere (i) to better integrate academic research and practice and (ii) to disseminate our findings to practitioners. I suggest that Management Science set up a forum to encourage submissions of papers that use rigorous methods to address pressing applied problems. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, Special Section of Management Science: 65th Anniversary.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 89 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 1% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 10% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 1% |
