A Review of Accounting Research Trends in the World

Trends in international accounting harmonization are extensive, so that demand on accounting research to meet international standards is more necessary and instant. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a review of accounting papers and find out the main characteristics of current accounting research trends in the world. I investigate trends by examining papers published in six top accouting journals (JCR 2015) from 2015 to 2016. I used citations made by accounting papers as a proxy for ranking and examine trends in topics and methodologies of these papers. This paper’s results suggest that financial accounting topics and archival methodologies are becoming more significantly over time during the research period. Moreover, the results also show that the movement in accounting research trends from a normative perspective to a positive perspective, especially an experimental research. From these results, I discuss the major characteristics of future accounting research trends and give some implications about accounting research to Vietnamese researchers.