Experimental judgment and decision research in auditing: the first 25 years of AOS

Abstract

We review the papers published in Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) during the period 1976–2000 that report auditing judgment and decision experiments. We also review the AOS papers during the same period that attempt to influence the future directions of such studies. Our review is focussed on describing the characteristics and quantity of such papers and assessing their impact on the scholarly literature. We employ citation data and analysis as the primary means of judging scholarly impact and we draw comparisons with other leading research journals. Our inquiry and analysis reveals that AOS papers reporting auditing judgment and decision experiments have been a significant component of the audit judgment and decision literature, although the impact of the AOS papers is less than that of papers appearing in the other leading journals. For the AOS future-directions papers, however, we find a relatively large number and citations that compare favorably with citations of both papers reporting experiments and future-direction papers in other leading journals.