Comparative study of accounting research methodology inside and outside of Iran

The main purpose of this research is the comparative methodological study of papers in the field of Accounting published by well-known magazines inside and outside of Iran. The domestic research lacks innovation and diversity in many areas such as issues to cover or even the methodology applied and this will limit the progression of knowledge of Accounting from both theoretical and practical point of view. Therefore, in this research the methodology applied in well-known Accounting papers are studied and later these methodologies are compared and discussed from different prospects. Moreover, the issues that these papers cover are compared with each other.
This research, from methodological point of view, is considered as a positive research in Accounting and from reasoning point of view is an inductive one. Besides, this study is a descriptive as well as developmental research.
The main purpose of this research is to propose a methodological framework for national papers. For this, a number of articles (1387-1390) are taken from “Advancements in Accounting” magazine, “the Iranian Accounting and Auditing Review” and ”Quarterly Journal of Securities Exchange” as they are the oldest related magazines in Iran. Foreign articles (the last issue published from 2008 to 2011) are taken from “Journal of Accounting & Economics”, “Accounting Organizations and Society”, “Accounting Review” and “Accounting Research” which gained high rankings based on Erasmus international ranking system. The sample consists of 263 domestic and 157 foreign papers.
The results show that the foreign papers benefit from more varieties in methodologies such as explanatory, empirical, longitudinal, historical, ethnography, casual-comparative and content-analysis methods.