No. 163: How does the Accounting Research Community Think About Open Science?

To understand how the accounting research community thinks about open science, we survey a sample of scholars who have published in leading accounting journals. Building on a voluntary disclosure-themed discussion of the costs and benefits of open accounting research, we document that accounting researchers tend to be more skeptical about the reproducibility of their influential findings than researchers from other social science areas are about theirs. Also, they are less familiar with the public sharing of research materials and pre-register their study designs less often. While they believe that accounting researchers in general and editors in particular favor research material sharing, they are skeptical about its actual prevalence in the accounting research community. We contrast these survey results with observational data, documenting that research material sharing is indeed relatively rare and often linked to journals with data and code sharing policies. We interpret this descriptive evidence as indicating an “accounting open science dilemma” and suggest strategies for addressing it.