Call for Papers

Improving the review process
With the aim to improve the academic profile of the EAA annual congresses, during the last years the SSC has been implementing new ideas, such us the requirement of full-papers only and the introduction of discussants for papers of particular interest. Nevertheless new formulas are still under consideration to improve the review process as well as the presentation of papers at the conference. To this end the SC will be increased up to 50 members, plus the SSC members, and the scoring methodology has been included in this website (see below). Moreover the submission categories are also going to be revised to achieve a clearer picture of the topics and research methods. This will not only improve the review process but the organisation of the sessions.

Submission categories
In the SSC´s view the eighteen submission categories used in the past are not clear enough so that a change seems appropriated to rationalize it. Some are nowadays redundant (e.g. INA: International Accounting), others are difficult to differentiate (e.g. FIN: Financial Accounting, capital markets, and FAN: Financial Statement Analysis), and more importantly they are a mix of theme/subject of inquiry (e.g. Management Accounting) and method/perspective of inquiry (e.g. Critical Perspectives). This results in, for example, papers currently classified as historical or critical perspectives are always clustered together even though they deal with different topics (e.g. Management Accounting and Financial Accounting). In order to increase the dialogue amongst the various perspective of inquiry, and to avoid the creation of dogmatic paradigms, the SSC is working towards a new submission procedure that captures topic and method, so that the sessions could be organised according to topics but each author/paper will carry a key identifying the method/perspective adopted.

This will imply that some categories (e.g. History/Archival, Analytical/Modelling, Interdisciplinary/Critical perspective) would be considered methodological instead of topic categories, so that the SSC will be able to combine the various papers in different ways (keeping homogeneity of methods or mixing them as they deal with the same topic and thus a comparison of approaches could be interesting). This new procedure will be gradually implemented as follows:

EAA Congress 2009: The number of topic categories has been reduced and renamed.
EAA Congress 2010: The methodology/perspective categories will be extensively introduced.

Consequently authors are invited to submit papers to any of the categories indicated below:

AU = Auditing
AM = Analytical/Modelling
ED = Accounting Education
FA = Financial Analysis *
FR = Financial Reporting *
GV = Accounting and Governance
HA = History/Archival
IC = Interdisciplinary/Critical Perspective
IS = Accounting and Information Systems
MA = Management Accounting
PS = Public Sector Accounting
SE = Social and Environmental Accounting
TX = Taxation

* The choice between Financial Analysis and Financial Reporting is essentially that between users and preparers. Although not always a simple distinction, if a paper considers how the environment relates to accounting information it should be in the former. If it considers choices and methods concerning the preparation of accounting statements it should be in the latter.

On submission, you will also be asked to categorize your paper within one of the following research methods:

a)  Empirical Archival (database or archive)
b)  Empirical Survey
c) Empirical Field (case) study
d) Empirical Experiment
e) Non-Empirical: Analytical
f)   Non-Empirical: Theory

Types of sessions
Regarding the 2009 conference, there will three types of sessions. Parallel Sessions with Discussant (PSD) where selected relevant papers will be individually discussed by experts in the area (2 papers in each session), Parallel Sessions (PD) that will include 3 papers in normal sessions, and Research Forum Sessions (RF) where 5 less developed papers will be briefly presented in each session. The decision to be included in one of these sessions will be made by the SSC taking into account the scores obtained in the review process.

Multiple submissions
By EAA policy, each individual is limited to one personal appearance on the program as a presenting author. This policy implies that an author can submit and present only one paper. However this author can always be a co-author of other submitted papers.

Submission rules
Authors are invited to submit full papers. The deadline for the submission of papers is 1 December 2008, 23:59 GMT.

A full paper is a completely scholarly research report that could reasonably be submitted for publication in a public working paper data base such as SSRN.

Papers will be subject to a double-blind review process by the Scientific Committee, so please do NOT include a cover page with your submission. Information typically provided on a cover page will be entered on the on-line submission form.

If you submit a paper that contains any information identifying you or your co-author(s), the paper shall be removed from the system, and you will be invited to resubmit. It will be YOUR responsibility to resubmit.

Papers can only be submitted electronically via this website (please see the page “Online Paper Submission” and follow the instructions).

Papers received by postal mail, fax or in writing will not be considered.

Papers should be submitted in English.

Confirmation of acceptance or rejection by the SSC will be given after 16 February 2009 and mailed to the corresponding address of the presenting author, together with instructions for PSD, PS or RF.

The presenter of an accepted paper must register as a participant for the congress before 16 March 2009.

Review instructions
To ‘anchor’ the grading of the papers to be presented at the congress, the following assumption will be made: be ready for submission to a journal like European Accounting Review (EAR). If so they will score a 4 in the scoring system outlined below. As the 4 is the reference level we now give more information on what 4 would represent for papers submitted, but first keep in mind the definition of full-papers provided above.

To achieve a 4, a full paper defined submitted should:

a) present a coherent argument
b) address a topic of research interest and importance,
c) display awareness of previous work in the area,
d) outline a valid research approach,
e) include evidence and/or arguments which, although possibly incomplete, appear reliable, and
f ) indicate awareness of the work which may still be required.

Based on the ‘anchor’, the scoring system is:

6 → Likely to be accepted with, possibly minor, revisions required by a journal like EAR.
5 → Likely to be accepted with, possibly quite substantial, revisions required by a journal like EAR.
4 → The paper could reasonably be submitted to a journal like EAR.
3 → Not yet ready for submission but could be expected to be ready with a few weeks work.
2 → Represents initial work on a potentially viable project but is not likely to be ready for submission for some time.
1 → The submitted work does not, as yet, provide evidence of a viable research project.