Small and Large Faculty-size Adjusted Accounting Program Rankings Based on Research-active Faculty: A Uniform Approach

INTRODUCTION Accounting researchers have ranked accounting programs for almost 45 years, and this research has evolved significantly during this time. For example, early studies ranked programs based on responses to questionnaires and surveys, and these studies were followed by rankings based on article counts from program graduates, rankings based on citation analyses of program graduates, and then rankings programs based on faculty and PhD program graduates' representation on editorial boards. More recent studies have ranked accounting programs based on PhD placements, the research productivity of faculty based on employment institution or PhD institution (i.e., measures of graduates' prestige), and the latest research innovations included accounting program rankings based on productivity of faculty by research topical areas and research methodologies. (1) An issue with a number of prior studies was the lack of control for faculty size, which can potentially alter accounting program rankings. Even in studies that controlled for faculty size, a common additional issue was the inclusion of faculty and PhD students who were not research active, and perhaps never were research active. To resolve these sample issues, the objective of this study is to demonstrate an innovative, efficient, and uniform approach for calculating faculty-size adjusted accounting program rankings that can be applied to any set of accounting journals (e.g., top-3, top-6, top-10, top-20, top-25, top-40, etc.). To illustrate the uniform approach, the study uses a sample of top-6 accounting journal publications over the 2006-2013 period and controls for faculty size by including only active researchers at each school: that is, authors who published during this period in one or more of the top-6 accounting journals. (2) The study weighs each institution by the number of authors on each article, as well as the number of affiliations per author, and provides faculty-size adjusted and non-faculty-size adjusted rankings of institutions 1-75 with the most weighted Research Articles in the top-6 accounting journals from 2006-2013. The aim is fourfold: 1) to demonstrate a uniform approach for calculating faculty-size adjusted rankings, 2) to assess whether faculty-size adjusted rankings based on this uniform approach differ significantly from non-faculty-size adjusted rankings, 3) to identify how faculty-size adjusted accounting program rankings potentially complement prior accounting program rankings research, and 4) to create and present separate rankings for programs with large (over 13 faculty members) and small (from 3-13 faculty members) based on publications in top-6 accounting journals from 2006-2013. A review of prior literature revealed seven prior accounting program rankings studies that adjusted for faculty size: Andrews and McKenzie (1978), Bublitz and Kee (1984), Jacobs et al. (1986), Hasselback and Reinstein (1995), Stammeijohan and Hall (2002), Brown and Laksmana (2004), and Baldwin and Trinkle (2013). Each study is discussed in more detail in the prior research section, and is highlighted here to indicate the method each study used to calculate its faculty-size adjusted program rankings. Andrews and McKenzie (1978) calculated a publication per faculty member index, while Bublitz and Kee (1984) adjusted for faculty size by deflating their unadjusted publication measures by the number of faculty and doctoral students at each institution, and Jacobs et al. (1986) ranked the top-25 doctoral programs based on a time- and size-adjusted publication productivity index they created from publications by doctoral program graduates. Hasselback and Reinstein (1995) calculated unadjusted doctoral program rankings, and then adjusted the rankings for journal quality and doctoral graduates per school. Stammerjohan and Hall (2002) ranked 80 U.S. PhD granting institutions based on initial placements of graduates, allowed rankings to differ for both doctoral granting and non-doctoral granting institutions, and then adjusted the rankings of U. …