Who is interested in our research? The role of authors, reviewers, and editors in providing ‘relevant’ research
Who is reading our research? Are our publications only targeting accounting academics, or are they also picked up beyond?
This editors’ panel focuses on the relevance of accounting studies for practitioners and policymakers. While the themes of ‘relevance lost’ and ‘relevance regained’ has been on the radar of accounting researchers for decades (Drury, 1990; Roslender 1996, Holthausen & Watts 2001), the general impression in recent publications on the topic (Rajgopal, 2021; Burton et al. 2021) is not optimistic, and suggests that even today we hardly have impact outside of our own community. A number of colleagues have emphasized that it is hard for individual researchers to change this tendency, and that there is a need for structural support to make accounting research relevant (Leuz, 2018; Garcia Osma et al. 2023).
We invite the editors to reflect on the necessity for accounting studies to contribute to practice, on the urgency for reviewers to more explicitly take such contributions into account, and on what authors can do to increase relevance.
Moderator
Martine Cools | KU Leuven
Jochen Pierk | Erasmus Schoof of Economics
Panellists
Nadia Albu | Accounting in Europe
Kris Hardies | Accounting Open
Martin Jacob | The Accounting Review
Matias Laine | European Accounting Review
Schedule
Date | Time: Wednesday 27 May 2026 17:00 – 18:30
Location: RB 101 (Rajská Building)
