Meta-analysis of variables descriptive statistics in accounting journals

Data accuracy plays an important role in any research. One of the reasons a paper is rejected by international accounting journals is non-reliance of editors on domestic data due to lack of access to this data in international databases. Also, one of the ways that editors and reviewers can find out the accuracy of data is to refer to the descriptive statistics of variables previously published in accounting journals. Therefore, this study uses descriptive statistics of frequent variables in accounting journals approved by Ministry of science to provide an overview of variables in Iranian accounting journals and be used by accounting researchers, peer reviewers and editors as a scale of variable limits in papers. This study reviews 632 papers published in sixteen journals approved by the Ministry of Science in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The results show that the standard deviation and dispersion of some variables are high and some are low. Variables such as cash holdings, equity returns, and the ratio of intangible assets have the lowest dispersion, and variables such as earnings per share, book value per share, and the asset's logarithm have the highest dispersion among the variables.