Are public sector accounting researchers going through an identity shift due to the increasing importance of journal rankings?

Abstract

Researchers are faced with increasing pressure to publish in top international journals, particularly public sector accounting (PSA) researchers due to the relatively lower ranking of journals in their field. Recruitment procedures for new staff members, protocols for the quality assessment of existing staff members, and decisions for funding research are increasingly affected by journal rankings. This paper aims to unravel the impact of the growing importance of journal rankings on the identity of PSA researchers. Professional identity is applied as a theoretical lens and so-called real-life constructs are developed for empirical investigation through interviews with senior researchers. The findings reveal how PSA researchers are coping with a context permeated by tensions between their original identity and an identity affected by a stronger reliance on scoring based on journal rankings. Our study shows in particular that PSA researchers tend to preserve their original identity of a committed PSA scholar and simultaneously move towards the “academic performer” identity by navigating the grey area between these extremes. There is no significant evidence for a fundamental identity shift towards an “academic performer” because researchers are primarily inspired by problems of public sector organizations or society at large. However, it remains to be seen if young scholars faced with publication targets that are too demanding and unrealistic shift their focus away from the original PSA researcher identity to an “academic performer” identity.