A study published on ScienceDirect in February 2026, “North American Accounting Researchers’ Acceptance of Debatable Research and Authorship Practices” by Charles D. Bailey and Irana Scott, surveyed 375 active accounting researchers on how acceptable they consider 44 discrete practices that sit in the gray zone of research and authorship conduct. The paper is the published version of research the authors circulated in earlier working-paper form on SSRN under closely related titles, so the underlying dataset and analysis have been through several rounds of revision before reaching print.
What the survey did
The authors emailed authors who had published in twelve leading accounting research journals over the preceding twelve years across the United States and Canada, asking them to rate the acceptability of 44 practices spanning both general research conduct and authorship specifically. Factor analysis of the responses grouped the items into five broader categories of research practices and six broader categories of authorship practices. Beyond the numeric ratings, 74 participants volunteered written anecdotes describing situations involving these practices that they had witnessed or taken part in during their careers — giving the paper a qualitative layer alongside the survey data.
Why a discipline-specific survey like this matters
Most widely cited authorship guidance — the ICMJE authorship criteria, CRediT (ANSI/NISO Z39.104), COPE’s authorship discussion documents — was developed inside, or with heavy input from, biomedical and general scientific publishing. Business and accounting research has no equivalent field-wide authorship body: individual journals set their own submission policies, and norms have historically been transmitted informally, through doctoral supervision and departmental convention, rather than codified. A survey that asks a discipline’s own working researchers to rate specific debatable practices — rather than restating a borrowed general standard — is one of the few ways to see what a field’s actual authorship norms are, as opposed to what a policy document says they should be.
That gap is also why authorship-order conventions vary so much by discipline in the first place: alphabetical-order fields, contribution-order fields, and fields with no settled convention at all are frequently the same fields that have never run a study like this one to check whether local practice matches what researchers themselves consider acceptable.
Where this sits alongside general research-integrity findings
The practices this survey groups under “debatable research and authorship practices” overlap substantially with what research-integrity literature more broadly calls questionable research practices (QRPs) — a category distinct from outright fabrication or falsification in that individual instances are often defensible in context, but the practices become a governance concern in aggregate or when applied inconsistently. Authorship-specific QRPs most commonly discussed in the wider literature include gift authorship (crediting someone who did not meet contribution criteria) and ghost authorship (omitting someone who did). CASRAI’s ghost authorship vs. gift authorship comparison and the COPE flowchart for ghost, guest, and gift authorship cover how these are typically defined and adjudicated in fields that do have a formal standard to check against — useful reference points for reading a discipline-specific acceptance survey like this one, since the underlying practices being rated are largely the same ones, even though accounting research lacks an ICMJE-equivalent baseline to measure “acceptable” against.
What it means for departments, journals, and research offices
For accounting and business-school research administrators, the practical takeaway is not a single statistic but the existence of the underlying gap: a field this large publishing this much output has had no field-wide authorship standard to reference, and a substantial share of its own active researchers apparently regard a meaningful number of debatable practices as acceptable enough to have witnessed or participated in them, per the anecdotes the authors collected. That is a reasonable prompt for individual accounting journals and departments to look at whether their own authorship policies — order rules, criteria for inclusion, expectations at dissertation and early-career stages — are written down at all, rather than assuming informally transmitted convention is sufficient. Where a department wants a documented baseline rather than an ad hoc one, adapting the ICMJE four-part test or a CRediT-style contribution statement is a more concrete starting point than continuing to rely on unwritten disciplinary custom.
Related CASRAI resources
- ICMJE authorship criteria — the four-part test most non-accounting fields use as a baseline.
- Resolving authorship order disputes.
- Authorship order conventions by discipline.
- COPE’s flowchart for ghost, guest, and gift authorship.
- Ghost authorship vs. gift authorship comparison.
- Questionable research practices (dictionary entry).
A note on scope
This is a single discipline-specific survey (n=375), not a policy change, regulatory action, or field-wide mandate — treat its findings as evidence about accounting-research culture specifically, not as generalizable to research authorship norms overall. CASRAI has not independently verified the paper’s numeric findings beyond what is stated in the publicly available abstract and listing information at the time of writing; readers who need the full statistical breakdown by category should consult the published article directly.
