Points to Consider When Self-Assessing Your Empirical Accounting Research

We provide a list of Points to Consider (PTCs) to help researchers self-assess whether they have addressed certain common issues that arise frequently in accounting seminars and in reviewers’ and editors’ comments on papers submitted to journals. Anticipating and addressing such issues can help accounting researchers, especially doctoral students and junior faculty members, convert an initial empirical accounting research idea into a thoughtful and carefully designed study. Doing this also allows outside readers to provide more beneficial feedback rather than commenting on the common issues that could have been dealt with in advance. The list consists of five sections: Research Question; Theory; Contribution; Research Design and Analysis; and Interpretation of Results and Conclusions. In each section, we include critical items that are common and offer suggestions for how to address them. The text elaborates on some of the more challenging items, such as how to increase a study’s contribution, and provides examples of how such issues have been effectively addressed in previous accounting studies.