La ricerca accademica in ambito ragionieristico: tendenze a confronto

Consistently with the social and institutional paradigm, countries with similar culture, such as Italy and Spain, could show similar trends in the development of accounting methods and research. Also developing the Comparative International Accounting History (CIAH) perspective, this research analyses and compares publication patterns in accounting from an historical point of view, aiming at understanding emerging topics and trends. It considers 20 years of an Italian accounting journal (RIREA) and a Spanish one (REFC), as both journals well represent Italian and Spanish accounting traditions. Specifically, the paper focuses on analysing and comparing authorship and topics trends, developing a content analysis of each issue between 1994 and 2014. Considering the single article as a research unit, in the first phase we collected the indices, titles, authors, affiliations, abstracts or introductions from each journal. Then we built a database with more than 1,600 articles. Adapting previous methods, we coded the database to classify the main themes, research and time settings. Finally, we analysed and compared the trends of both papers. Results show many common patterns in the Spanish and Italian accounting journals starting from topics, authorship patterns, time and empirical settings. Both countries experience a significant increase of multi-authored papers, meaning that the exchange of ideas in accounting research is growing. There is growing interest in cross-country setting, which confirms a trend towards internationalisation. This research contributes to compare different non Anglo-Saxon countries’ accounting research, highlighting common trends and confirming previous literature.