LAUSR

This paper employs social network analysis to explore the relational structure of co-authorship in five accounting journals: The Accounting Review, Accounting, Organizations and Society, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, and Contemporary Accounting Research. We discover that the network of authoring accounting academics exhibits “small-world” properties. These results bear implications on the quality of the production and dissemination of novel ideas in accounting scholarship: within a small-world of scholars, the dissemination of new ideas may be fast across the network, but on the other hand, a closely connected network may be less open to the influx of heterodox or radical ideas.